"The Japanese eco-fantasist Hayao Miyazaki is an animation magician, a crowd-pleasing storyteller who is also a builder of worlds," David Chute wrote in Film Content. In animated movies such as Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso, Kiki's Delivery Service, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, The Castle of Cagliostro, and Panda, Little Panda, Miyazaki displays his verve and style. Rarely resorting to computer animation, the Japanese animator and director himself hand colors individual frames in the grand old tradition of Disney movies of yore. In his 1999 import, Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki personally drew or oversaw the drawing of seventy per cent of the frames, over 80,000 of the 140,000 total. Though some of his films had already been distributed in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, the Disney corporation in 1998 contracted to release many of Miyazaki's films in the United States.

Miyazaki...