To plan the menu for the museum café, Miyazaki hired not a professional chef but a woman who was a good home cook and had raised four children: he wanted homemade bread; katosand, breaded pork-cutlet sandwiches; and fresh vegetable soup. When he heard that children were prying open the little windows on a model of a house in the museum, and had broken the shutters, he was delighted, and placed pictures inside the house for kids to see. He painted several large murals—one of a commissary, another of an old animation studio—himself. Some of Miyazaki's ideas could not be realized. He had wanted to make a mountain of dirt at the Ghibli Museum—a mountain with muddy, slippery stretches where children "would fall and get scolded by their mothers." He had liked the idea, too, of a spiral staircase that gently swayed when you walked up it. These notions were eventually deemed unsafe or impractical, but, over all, the museum still feels stubbornly, and joyfully, idiosyncratic.

Despite Miyazaki's fame—his latest film, "Howl's Moving Castle," grossed a record $14.5 million in its first week of release in Japan—he almost never grants formal interviews. Yet a few days after I visited the museum I was lucky enough to run into him during a tour of his nearby studio, and he began chatting amiably. It immediately became apparent why he was compelled to create imaginary worlds. A spry, slim man of sixty-three, with silver hair, parenthesis-shaped dimples, and thick, expressive black eyebrows, Miyazaki betrayed a profound dissatisfaction with modern life. He complained, "Everything is so thin and shallow and fake." He lamented the fact that children had become disconnected from nature, and fulminated about the deadening impact of video games on the imagination. Only half in jest, he said that he was hoping for the day when "developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer, and wild grasses take over." And the conversation grew only darker from there. A man disappointed, even infuriated, by the ugliness surrounding him, Miyazaki is devoted to making whatever he can control—a museum, each frame of a film—as gorgeous as it can be.

John Lasseter, the director of "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life," is an ardent fan, and a friend, of Miyazaki's. He recently visited the Ghibli Museum with his sons. "You know how when you're watching a movie, you'll say, 'Wow, I've never seen that before'? With his films, that happens in every sequence," he said. "And he has such a big heart; his characters and his worlds are so rich. The museum is like having a place to visit those worlds. It's like when Disneyland first opened, in the fifties—visitors must have felt, in a very pure way, like they had walked inside a Disney film."

People have been invoking Miyazaki and Disney in the same breath for a long time, and in some ways it is an apt comparison. Miyazaki films are as popular in Japan as Disney films are in America. ("Spirited Away" is Japan's highest-grossing movie ever.) Miyazaki-inspired merchandise—such as plush versions of the Totoro, a rotund woodland creature of Miyazaki's devising—is nearly as ubiquitous in Japan as Disney stuff is here. Like Walt Disney, Hayao Miyazaki started his professional career drawing animation cels and rose to head an independent cartoon empire with a tentacular hold on kids' imaginations.

Yet, in themes and style, Miyazaki's eight films do not much resemble the Disney oeuvre. Unlike Disney movies—so many of which are based on familiar fairy tales—Miyazaki's films are either original stories or his own adaptations of fairly obscure works. Though they contain set pieces of suspenseful action—he is particularly fond of airship battles and dramatic rescues in the sky—they have a much quieter, less frenetic feel. In part, this is because they are not musicals: no brassy showstoppers or treacly ballads interrupt the narratives. Moreover, his films rarely have villains of the scenery-chewing, extravagantly black-hearted Disney variety. Miyazaki sometimes forgoes villains altogether—as in "Totoro" and the charming "Kiki's Delivery Service" (1989), the story of an apprentice witch—making you forget what a fixture they are in other children's films. His is not a black-and-white moral universe: he has sympathy for the vain and the gluttonous and the misguided, a bemused tolerance for the poor creatures we all are. Some of his characters can be threatening or unappealing, but also complex and capable of change—like the moody young wizard in "Howl's Moving Castle," which will be released here later this year. It might be said that Miyazaki's malevolent characters are capable of redemption, except that redemption is too Christian an idea: it's more that they prove capable of a kind of shape-shifting, which allows them to reveal a different facet of themselves.

The absence of villains also means a refreshing absence of perfect and perfectly pretty heroines, their lives arcing toward romance. Miyazaki's protagonists are usually girls, and though they are likable and loyal, they tend to be ordinary children—which makes them extraordinary in the world of children's films. Miyazaki dwells on the latent phase of childhood, so that his girl characters are often close friends with boys. And they can be bratty and grievously sad, as well as plucky and resourceful.

In "My Neighbor Totoro," one of the loveliest children's films ever made, two sisters, Mei and Satsuki, are not idealized; they are at once goofy, brave, and vulnerable, like a lot of kids. The sisters have just moved with their father to a new house in rural Japan. Gradually, the two girls discover a host of strange but benign woodland creatures: fuzzy little soot sprites that hang out in old houses and hide when you turn on the lights; the plump, whiskered Totoros, who live in the roots of a giant camphor tree; and the marvelous cat bus, with its headlight eyes, caramel-colored stripes, and extra legs that function as wheels. (In a 1993 televised discussion between Miyazaki and the director Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa mentioned how much he admired the sweetly surreal cat bus.) There is a gentle hint of Shintoism

in all this: the father, an anthropologist, respectfully accepts the notion that the forest is presided over by spirits, though he is no longer able to see them, as his children can. Unlike the animals in most American cartoons, these creatures are not excessively anthropomorphized; they don't speak, which somehow makes them seem both more plausible and more dignified, and which gives the girls the delightful challenge of interpreting them. In fact, the film is focused on dignifying the girls' imaginations, honoring their ability to partake in a fantasy that is both comforting and fortifying—for we gradually learn that they are separated from their mother, who is ill and in the hospital.

The tone of the film is dreamy and playful—it has the sun-soaked colors and languid pace of a summer afternoon in the country—but the way it melds such elements with a subtle psychological treatment of the children's anxiety over their mother makes it a radical film. When four-year-old Mei learns that her mother won't be coming home for a visit as planned, her grief takes the form of a tantrum. She howls—her mouth a black cavern, her arms stiff. (In Disney movies, children weep decorously or break into poignant song.) Satsuki, panicked and struggling to be the mature sister, shouts at her not to be so "stupid"; Mei runs away to the hospital to find her mother. Both girls are ultimately rescued by the cat bus, which opens up a warm, golden, womb-like interior to them—an entrancing image of solace—and bounds across the countryside to return them to their father. Miyazaki is a master at conveying emotions as a child would experience them: obliquely, often physically, with a thread of magical thinking that promotes resilience.

Miyazaki's films are also striking for their preoccupation with the environment, and their not entirely metaphorical suggestion that the natural world is capable of remembering what's been done to it. (He believes that we harbor "memories in our DNA from before we took the form of humans.") "Nausicäa of

Miyazaki began his animation career in the nineteen-sixties, at a time when the economic miracle that had swiftly transformed postwar Japan into one of the strongest economies of the world was, almost as swiftly, obliterating its countryside. In the nineteen-eighties, the government cleaned up the worst industrial pollution, but Japan is still a country where developers (especially golf-resort planners) have free rein, where most people prefer nature in tamed and miniaturized form (bonsai, Zen gardens, lavishly packaged tiny melons), and where few places are untouched by commerce (there are vending machines on Mt. Fuji). "Spirited Away" contains a memorable scene in which a gloppy-looking creature—the spirit of a polluted river—comes to a bathhouse to be cleansed; a lot of dirty, foul-smelling labor is required. For this sequence, Miyazaki drew on his own memories of cleaning up a river—and pulling things like bicycles out of the muck.

Miyazaki's movies are threaded with other personal obsessions, just as samurai imagery pervades Kurosawa's work. Pigs, for example, turn up in many films. ("The behavior of pigs is very similar to human behavior," Miyazaki has said. "I really like pigs at heart, for their strengths as well as their weaknesses.") A 1992 film, "Porco Rosso," tells the story of a pig that flies—he's a pilot who works the skies over the Adriatic before the Second World War. In one tender scene, the pig recalls the air battle in which his fellow flying aces just kept ascending—floating ever upward into a cold empyrean death—while he, a more earthbound creature, could not face such self-sacrifice. Next month, Disney, the American distributor of Miyazaki's films, will release a video version of "Porco," whose title charter will be voiced by Michael Keaton. It will also make available an English version of "Nausicäa, with voices by Uma Thurman and Patrick Stewart. With these two releases, the entirety of Miyazaki's eccentric output will be available in good English versions for the first time.

John Lasseter told me that when the animators at Pixar get stuck on a project they go into a screening room and watch a Miyazaki film. The irony of this admiration is that Miyazaki is an old-fashioned artist who has rejected the computerized path that many animation studios, including Pixar, have taken. (Last year, Disney closed down its hand-drawn-animation unit, in Florida, in favor of digitally rendered work.) Though Miyazaki incorporates some computer graphics in his films, he insists that all his characters and backgrounds be drawn by hand.

Toshio Suzuki, a wry, articulate man with close-cropped silver hair and an elfin grin, is Miyazaki's producer and longtime collaborator. "When silents moved to talkies, Chaplin held out the longest," he told me. "When black-and-white went to color, Kurosawa held out the longest. Miyazaki feels he should be the one to hold out the longest when it comes to computer animation." Miyazaki lavishes particular attention on his backgrounds, which are full of painterly flourishes. I'd never really noticed the colors in an animated film until I noticed his. Skies and seas are saturated in strangely emotional blues; wet halos surround the red lantern and absinthe-green neon signs in "Spirited Away"; in "Kiki's Delivery Service," the young witch's dress isn't quite black—it's the smudged purple of the darkest plums.