By Steve Sailer

Unfortunately, most of the "anime" that has made it to America has been a disgrace to Japan's tradition of visual elegance. "Spirited Away," however, is perhaps the most gorgeous animated film since the 1992 American-Japanese production "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland." Sadly, that dream-logic movie flopped in America, and I fear "Spirited Away," for all its visual virtues, might as well.

The truth is, that from Biblical times through Freud and Jung, dreaming has been vastly overrated. The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov rightly complained of dreams' "mental mediocrity."

In his "Alice" books, Lewis Carroll exploited the most notable feature of dreams -- that insidious sense that you must be grossly violating social norms that you can't quite remember -- by confronting Alice with the huffy certitude of bizarre creatures each armed with his own lunatic code of manners, like a Victorian episode of "Seinfeld."

The struggle to fit in is also a theme in Miyazaki's take-off on Carroll. Politeness is central to Japanese society because formal codes of conduct allow shy people to work together so well in vast businesses.