Entering Strange Realms

His name may be unfamiliar to American audiences, but to American animators, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki is a hero on a par with Walt Disney, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery.

“He is one of the great filmmakers of our time and has been a tremendous inspiration to our generation of animators,” says John Lasseter, the Academy Award-winning director of the “Toy Story” films. “At Pixar, when we have a problem that we can’t seem to solve, we often look at one of Miyazaki’s films.”

Eric Goldberg, animation director of “The Looney Tunes Movie: Back in Action” at Warner Bros., adds: “Miyazaki’s films never fail to amaze: He takes everyday situations and links them to extraordinary circumstances. That he does so with such visual grace, economy, and passion for the joys and fears of childhood is constantly astonishing.”

In recent years, American animated features have become increasingly realistic as filmmakers have turned to computer graphics for three-dimensional settings and effects. Miyazaki reasserts the power of drawn animation to create fantasies, offering an alternate reality that is refreshingly free of overarticulated details. Instead of rendering thousands of individual blades of grass bending in the wind, he suggests a breeze passing over a grassy hillside by moving a rippling line of color over a painted background. The result is poetic rather than literal. American directors use MTV-style cutting and endless tracking shots; Miyazaki allows quiet moments to play out, telling the story visually rather than through dialogue or songs.

Since founding Studio Ghibli with his friend and former mentor Isao Takahata in 1985, he’s created a string of critical and box office successes in Japan: “Castle in the Sky” (1986), “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989), “Porco Rosso: The Crimson Pig” (1992), “Princess Mononoke” (1997) and “Spirited Away” (2001).

Until now, animated Japanese features have been box office duds here, but Disney is hoping to change that when it releases “Spirited Away” (“Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi”) in the U.S. on Sept. 20. The film was a blockbuster in Japan, earning more than $234 million in a country with less than half the population and a fraction of the screens of the U.S. and dethroning “Titanic” as the highest-grossing film in Japanese box office history. Earlier this year, it became the first animated feature to win the prestigious Golden Bear Award, the top honor at the Berlin Film Festival, where critics and audiences were stunned by the film’s remarkable visual style.

Although Americans spend more than half a billion dollars on anime (Japanese animation) on video and DVD annually, Japanese features have failed to attract large audiences to U.S. theaters. Despite considerable press attention, “Metropolis,” based on a manga (graphic novel) by Osamu Tezuka, earned a mere $253,000 in a limited U.S. release earlier this year. Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke,” which earned a then-record-breaking $154 million in Japan, made only $2.4 million when Miramax released it theatrically in the U.S. in 1999.

Disney and Pixar executives, along with members of the animation community who have seen the film, think “Spirited Away” could be the 61-year-old Miyazaki’s breakthrough in America. It’s opening in 10 cities and will build to a nationwide release, according to Disney, which is planning a major advertising campaign.

Lasseter, who served as executive producer on the English version of “Spirited Away,” says that like classic Disney films, “ ‘Spirited Away’ has humor, heart and tremendous character growth. It’s a bit scary at times, a bit strange--and wonderful: It sucks you in at the beginning, and you forget about everything until it’s over.”

Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase, Lilo in “Lilo & Stitch”), the main character, starts out as a whiny adolescent sulking in the back seat of her parents’ car. When they get lost on the way to their new home, the family blunders into what seems to be an abandoned theme park but is actually a resort for traditional Japanese gods and spirits. Guided by the mysterious, confident boy Haku (Jason Marsden), Chihiro demands a job from Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette), the flamboyant, grasping witch who runs the spa.

Although Yubaba assigns her hard, dirty jobs, Chihiro remains immune to the corruption and greed that permeate Yubaba’s realm. She aids a variety of fantastic characters, including a river god suffering from the effects of human pollution and the diaphanous No-Face. She befriends Zeniba (Pleshette again), Yubaba’s grandmotherly twin, and repays Haku’s kindness by helping him obtain his freedom. The strength, courage and love she discovers within herself enable Chihiro to rescue her parents and escape from the fantasy world.

The bizarre world Chihiro discovers evokes Japanese traditions that are vanishing before the onslaught of a jejune media culture Miyazaki dislikes.

“The setting of ‘Spirited Away’ is an older Japan, one that existed until a few decades ago,” the director said via e-mail. “Many adults cried when they saw that kind of almost forgotten scenery. But children in Japan have never seen anything similar, so it’s a complete fantasy world for them. I think foreign audiences may feel something similar to what Japanese children felt.”

Miyazaki made “Spirited Away” because he was disturbed by the apathy and ennui he saw in Japanese children. “There are five young girls, daughters of friends of mine, who visit me at my cabin in the mountains every summer,” he explained. “I read some girls’ comics they left at the cabin, and it seemed we’d been providing them with nothing but a certain kind of cheap romance, which is not what girls that age really dream about.

“I thought about making a more interesting story where a 10-year-old girl could actually play the leading role. I wanted her to be a typical girl--someone in whom a 10-year-old could recognize herself. I wanted to show that people have strengths within them that can be called on in extraordinary circumstances: That is how I wish my young friends to be, and I think that’s how they hope to be.”

When Miramax released “Princess Mononoke” in the United States, fans of Japanese animation criticized the vocal performances (Billy Bob Thornton, Billy Crudup, Gillian Anderson and Claire Danes, among others) as sounding too American for a story set in Muromachi-era Japan (1392-1573). But Disney felt “Spirited Away” should be released with American voices rather than subtitles.

“Miyazaki is a truly visual storyteller: He fills the entire screen with images. When you watch a subtitled movie, you’re really focused on following the dialogue,” says Pam Coats, an executive with Walt Disney Feature Animation. “If your eyes are fixed on the bottom of the screen, you’re going to miss visual elements that are unique and wonderful.”

The studio brought in Kirk Wise (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Atlantis: The Lost Empire”) to direct the English-language version of the film. Wise said he felt as if he was doing his job backward.

“On a typical American animated feature, we record the voices first, then create the images to go with them,” he explained. “Here the images were already done and in full color; we had to find Western voices that would fit those images.”

Creating the English-language version posed special problems for the actors, writers and director. Not only did the script have to preserve the meaning of the original, but each line had to have about the same number of syllables, so the new dialogue could be synchronized with the existing animation.

“We had the writers in the booth with us, so that if an actor had a difficult time fitting a line to the character’s mouth movements, we would do a rewrite on the fly to shave off a syllable or substitute a shorter word for a longer one,” Wise recalls. “We had to get the sync to work while making sure the performance sounded natural--it couldn’t sound like the actor was trying to force a lot of words into a very small space. Our editor would sometimes take a single syllable from one take and splice it into the middle of a sentence from another, just to get it that much tighter.”

The Disney team also had to add an occasional line to explain Japanese cultural references to non-Japanese viewers. “There are times when the imagery on the screen is something a Japanese audience would recognize but Americans wouldn’t,” Lasseter explains. “We made sure the character identified what they were looking at. At the beginning of the film, when Chihiro sees the little houses, we had her ask, ‘What are those?’ and her mother answers, ‘Those are shrines; people think spirits live in them.’ So we set things up to make sure they’re clear to American audiences.”

Miyazaki is at work on projects for the Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan, where he is the executive director. When they’re completed, he will begin his next feature, scheduled for release in summer 2004. Although he hadn’t seen the English-language dub at the time of the interview, Miyazaki was anticipating it with a typical mixture of confidence, optimism and humor.

“To my way of thinking, ‘Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi’ left home and went off to America to become ‘Spirited Away,’ ” he concluded. “It’s almost as if I’d seen my daughter go away to school in America. I’m sure John Lasseter has done a good job, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes back a little bit Americanized and speaking with a slight foreign accent.”

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Charles Solomon writes regularly about animation for The Times and other publications.