Scene Selection — Geoff Carter: ‘Spirited Away’ is an animated masterpiece

Friday, April 11, 2003 | 8:31 a.m.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle based free-lance film critic and entertainment writer. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com.

I'm not a big fan of the award that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently started giving to animated films. While I'm not aware of how those in the animation trade feel about the special Oscar, I think of it as a consolation prize for films that are, in many cases, as good as the Best Picture nominees.

Take the work of Hayao Miyazaki, for example. The master Japanese animator won the animation Oscar with last year's "Spirited Away," available Tuesday in a very good two-disc DVD set (Disney DVD, $29.99).

But while it had a couple of distinguished competitors (Disney's terrific "Lilo and Stitch" and "Treasure Planet"), it outclassed its remaining competition ("Ice Age," "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron") by such an embarrassing margin that the award may appear less significant.

"Spirited Away" is worthy of that Oscar, and then some. It could have competed in the Best Picture category if its actors weren't so much ink and paint, relegated by the Academy to a "drawer many confuse with a urinal," to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut.

It is as visually stunning as "Gangs of New York" and "Chicago," as inventive as "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," as lyrical as "The Hours" and as personal as "The Pianist."

It might have gotten a Best Picture nod if the consolation prize didn't exist, and it might have won.

Before he made "Spirited Away," Miyazaki was already acknowledged as a master animator, inside the industry and out (his "My Neighbour Totoro" is one of Roger Ebert's "100 Great Films," and "Princess Mononoke" is ranked No. 123 out of the Internet Movie Database's Top 200).

The DVD's documentary extras celebrate Miyazaki's genius -- animators from Disney and Pixar acknowledge the film as the work of a superior talent -- but it's an unnecessary effort: Less than a minute into "Spirited Away," that genius will be readily apparent.

The story of Chihiro, a typically precocious 10-year-old girl lost in a strange parallel world, "Spirited Away" is our generation's "Wizard of Oz," yet even further over the rainbow. Here you'll find a bathhouse inhabited by spirits, a train that runs on top of an ocean and many other wonders, yet none of it feels false.

Miyazaki takes pains to maintain the "plausible impossible," as Walt Disney once put it, and in doing so makes a world rich with sensation. You can almost smell the ocean air as the train rushes along.

I am hesitant to tell you much more than that. So few films offer surprises these days -- dumb shocks, sure (see "The Ring"), and plot reversals aplenty ("The Sixth Sense"), but very few surprises.

The real joys of "Spirited Away" can't be described, only felt firsthand. You'll be scared (very young children shouldn't watch it), heartbroken and elated by turns. And if every last hair on your neck doesn't stand up at least once during the picture, you should give up movies for sitcoms.

The film can be watched in its native Japanese or in a very good English dub supervised by Pixar head John Lasseter. A Japanese documentary on the making of the film shows something you rarely see in such documentaries made stateside: you see Miyazaki cracking the whip on his animators.

"It's difficult, isn't it?" he asks, correcting an animator's work. He is paternally kind, but nonetheless firm, and you can watch the art being shaped by his leadership.

Don't make the mistake the Academy is making: "Spirited Away" is no "Spirit." You can watch it with or without your children, and it will haunt your soul as much as it enchants your senses.