The Japanese eco-fantasist Hayao Miyazaki is an animation magician, a crowd-pleasing storyteller who is also a builder of worlds. He designs meticulously engineered imaginary aircraft, sets their perfect gears spinning, and propels them over moss-green rolling landscapes, zipping between the sprung columns of ruined castles. He uses animation in a refreshingly direct and intuitive way, reveling in its capacity to lift things off the ground.

Miyazaki rarely resorts to computer graphic imagery. In fact, he personally draws up to 70% of the individual frames in his movies---80,000 out of 140,000 in his latest, Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime, 1997), the film that recently surpassed all others at the box office in Japan. But even without the high gloss of CGI, deploying images that looks distinctly hand-crafted (a look as distinctively Japanese as the "organic" surface textures of an ancient teacup), he manages to seduce us into believing that these places actually, or at least "virtually" exist---that they could be turned and tipped and looked at from any angle, and contemplated as a whole.
 

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