SPIRITED AWAY (2001). This down-the-rabbit-hole animation -- which shared the Golden Bear (with Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday) at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival and won the 2002 Oscar for Best Animated Feature -- boasts a scrappy heroine whose real-life counterpart inspired Hayao Miyazaki to return to his lightboard after announcing his retirement in 1998 (following his artful box-office smash Princess Mononoke). Ten-year-old Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase) finds that her parents have been transformed into pigs after greedily eating food meant for spirits, and she enters a parallel world in an abandoned amusement park where she must petition for help from an evil witch (brilliantly voiced by Suzanne Pleshette). Her archetypal encounters ultimately end happily, but the journey is as exhilarating as the themes are universal. The scene where Chihiro must bathe a grotesque "stink spirit" during her stint at a bathhouse for the gods is simply classic. Miyazaki's refusal to bow to computer-generated methods yields a breathtakingly elegant mise-en-scène, all Turner seascapes and Parrish sunsets and Monet gardens. With its unforgettable backdrops and creatures born from a palette dripping with viscera and humor, this is as stimulating a visual experience as any non-psychotropically-enhanced viewer is likely to encounter this decade. Miyazaki understands the magic Disney intended, and he elevates it to a higher realm of dreamy, worldly mysticism that is appealing to children of all ages and temperaments. (124m)

Now playing at: