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Hayao Miyazaki's fluid action scenes, painterly uses of color and shade and myth-based storytelling have long made him a legend to cartoon geeks. The makers of Disney's "Mulan," in fact, saw their film as something of a Miyazaki homage for American audiences. Miramax has now gone its parent company one better, commissioning a new English script (by acclaimed comic-book and sci-fi author Neil Gaiman) for "Princess Mononoke," Miyazaki's biggest Japanese hit, along with several major box-office stars to read it.

Princess Mononoke Directed by Hayao Miyazaki Starring the voices of Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, Billy Bob Thornton, Gillian Anderson and Jada Pinkett Smith

We're a long way from the crude English overdubs done for "Speed Racer" and "Astro Boy" on 1960s television; the substitute cast provide characterizations of as much range and subtlety as the animation itself, and most viewers probably won't realize or care that the film was originally in another language.

On its most obvious level, "Princess Mononoke" is a yarn about a heroic quest into the realm of the supernatural, a storytelling mode as familiar as the legends of Beowulf, Siegfried or Hercules. But it also offers a complicated and untraditional view of gender and a highly contemporary lesson about human economy and its inevitable effect on the environment, along with a steadfast refusal to think in simplistic good-vs.-evil equations. If this is beginning to sound boring, don't worry. What I'm trying to say is that "Princess Mononoke" is likely to do the impossible -- it will thrill audience members aged from about 10 to 100 (although the violence in this movie is never gratuitous, it may prove too intense for younger children), and it may also get them thinking.

Our questing hero is Prince Ashitaka (Billy Crudup), a leader of the Emishi clan, a people banished to a distant land by the emperor's edict. We are in Japan's Muromachi era, during the late Middle Ages, when iron-making and the use of firearms are sweeping through the still-rural, feudal nation. In Miyazaki's mythologized version of history, this is also the era when the ancient gods of the wilderness, although still resisting human domination, are being hunted to extinction. Defending his village from a marauding demon -- an enormous boar crawling with crimson worms -- Ashitaka touches the monster and is contaminated by its evil power. Facing certain death, or, still worse, his own conversion into a demon, Ashitaka's only option is to leave his people forever and try to learn what drove the boar-god mad in the first place.

Next page | Consumer advisory: This is not a Disney film