Animated feature from Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. A young girl finds herself trapped in a mystical realm, where she must find a way to save her parents - who have been turned into pigs There‘s something almost criminal about the way Spirited Away took over two years to reach Britain after its original Japanese release. In Japan, Hayao Miyazaki is both commercially successful (his films regularly beat box office records) and highly respected (Akira Kurosawa said: "I am somewhat disturbed when critics lump our works together. One cannot mimimise the importance of Miyazaki‘s work by comparing it to mine."). In Britain, however, his work has barely got more than a few cursory arts venue screenings. At least Spirited Away - which took the Berlin Golden Bear in 2002 and the Best Animated Film Oscar in 2003 - made it. Better late than never.

After the stress of making his last film, 1997‘s Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki had a breakdown and retired. But he came out of retirement when an idea to create another, lighter film began to take shape. Princess Mononoke was an action-packed epic that ranged across 15th century Japan. For Spirited Away he returned to the quieter - but no less serious - themes that he addressed to a degree in 1988‘s My Neighbor Tortoro. Both films feature a family moving house, girls getting used to upheaval, and elements of ‘Alice In Wonderland‘. But where the 1988 film used a few specific motifs from Carroll‘s book (a plunge into a ‘rabbit hole‘, a version of the Cheshire cat), Spirited Away casts its 10-year-old protagonist, Chihiro (Hîragi; or Chase in the US dub), fully into a Wonderland, a mystical otherworld populated by animal spirits and gods. Chihiro arrives in this realm by accident. Her parents, heading for their new home, take a road that leads into the woods. Arriving at a dead end, they walk down a corridor through a building and emerge in what dad takes to be "an abandoned theme park". It‘s something like a Japanese Portmeirion, but eerily deserted. While her parents greedily help themselves to food, Chihiro wanders off and meets Haku (Irino; or Marsden), a boy who warns her to leave before dark. She‘s too late though - a lake has appeared, blocking her route, ghostly forms have populated the town and her parents have turned into pigs. She‘s trapped.

The only way to survive, Haku tells her, is to get work in the bath house that dominates the town. Here "eight million gods rest their weary bones", according to Yubaba (Natsuki; or Pleshette), the witch who runs the establishment. Chihiro makes her way to meet Yubaba with the help of Kamajii (Sugawara; Ogden Stiers), a multi-limbed codger who runs the boiler house, Lin (Tamai; Egan), a serving woman with a taste for "roasted newt", and even a ‘Radish God‘, a giant sumo of a chap with tuber-like appendages. Yubaba is hardly forthcoming - her realm is "no place for humans" - but she‘s forced to give Chihiro work, thanks to an oath she swore. Chihiro gets work helping Lin. But the management give them the worst jobs - such as assisting a hideous oozing creature they take to be a "Stink God; an extra large stinker at that". It‘s an entity so foul its smell makes food rot instantaneously, while its suppurations fill the room with a noxious gloop.

Chihiro - or Sen as she becomes when Yubaba takes her name as part of her contract - does get by in the bath house, but it‘s not without further incident. She may lose her identity, but she retains her decency. One act of kindness results in a dangerous spirit, No Face, getting into the bath house and wreaking havoc by playing on the greed of the other employees ("Gold springs from his palms!"). She even gets involved in an adventure that reveals her mysterious bond with Haku. But can she save her parents? It‘s often said that Katsuhiro Otomo‘s Akira (1988) is the greatest anime ever. That‘s as maybe, but every one of Miyazaki‘s films is a masterpiece, so it‘s hard to pick just one that stands out. It‘s also tricky to compare his works with the more traditionally received notion of anime (giant robots, demons with phallic tentacles, telekinetic fighting, atom bomb-style explosions etc).

Although Miyazaki insists it‘s not his role to be didactic, all of his work (notably his second feature Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind and Princess Mononoke) has strong messages about ecology and the human relationship with the natural world. But he‘s also fascinated with coming-of-age stories, notably about how girls (many of his protagonists are young females) can not only face up to adult responsibility, but also how they can become strong, principled members of society. Here Chihiro is forced to grow up fast, but the process, while gruelling, is not without real benefits, as her understanding of the way society functions and experience of adult emotions develops exponentially.

Some aspects of the film are likely to be too foreign for Westerners - we‘re ignorant of Japanese belief systems, with their hierarchies of entities - but Miyazaki‘s work has the power to transcend such culturally specific elements. While many of his earlier films drew on European stories (such as 1986‘s Castle In The Sky, from Swift), the folkloric features he reworks are often universal. But most of all, his team‘s animation - here utilising more digital techniques, while still being grounded in 2D traditions - is always beautiful and, in places, breathtaking. Locations are atmospheric, details are immaculate (you can identify the flower species in the gardens) and characters are diverse. Yubaba, for example, is a bizarre creation, a stocky woman with a huge head and even bigger hairdo; the bath house itself is stocked with all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures, from a Kermit-like assistant, to creatures reminiscent of his cuddly woodland deity from My Neighbor Tortoro, to troll-like beasts that look related to Maurice Sendak‘s ‘Wild Things‘). The only factor that could be seen as mildly misjudged is Jô Hisaishi‘s score, which is overbearing in places.