Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941. In 1985 he and his longtime colleague Isao Takahata started their own animation company, Studio Ghibli, and since then he has made the most beautiful animated films I know.

What I teach from them is this:

He looks. The way a four-year-old runs, all knees and urgency. The way rain starts, a few big drops first. The way a girl pushes her hair out of her face when she's tired. None of it is needed for the story, and all of it is why you believe the story.

He draws by hand. Painted backgrounds, drawings on cels, thousands upon thousands of them. I've read that he went over a large share of the drawings in Princess Mononoke himself. When I tell my students that, the ones who've been tracing their way through Art I go quiet.

He doesn't need a villain. Some of his films have them, but often the problem is weather, or growing up, or a sick mother, or two sides who are both partly right. Children in his films are brave and capable and frightened, all at once, the way real children are.

He loves to fly. Witches on brooms, seaplanes, airships, gliders, a girl falling slowly out of the sky. Almost every film leaves the ground at some point, and your stomach goes with it.

My Neighbor Totoro came out in Japan in 1988. Two sisters, Satsuki, who is about ten, and Mei, who is four, move to an old house in the country in the 1950s with their father, to be near the hospital where their mother is recovering. In the woods behind the house there is a giant camphor tree, and in the tree lives Totoro.

That's nearly the whole plot, and I would not add a thing. Here's why I think it's perfect:

• Nothing bad happens on purpose. There is fear in it, real fear, a sick mother and a lost child, but no one is cruel. I show it to fifteen-year-olds and it holds them anyway.
• The father believes his daughters. When the girls tell him what they've seen, he doesn't laugh and he doesn't lecture. Every parent in America should watch him do it.
• The bus stop in the rain. Satsuki waiting at night with an umbrella, the long quiet, and then who comes to stand beside her. I have shown that scene to perhaps two thousand teenagers. It works every time. I use it to teach timing: how much a picture can do if you let it sit still.
• The Catbus. A bus that is a cat. Enough said. My students' sketchbooks fill up with Catbuses for weeks afterward, and I let them.
• The backgrounds. Look at the light on the rice fields, and the dust in the empty house when the girls first open the shutters. That's paint. That's somebody's hand.

Totoro became the emblem of Studio Ghibli, and the little round gray fellow is on everything in Japan, I'm told. In Japan it opened on a double bill with Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies, which is a masterpiece and one of the saddest films ever made. I can't imagine seeing both in one afternoon.

Only two of his films have been easy to buy in this country, and I own both:

My Neighbor Totoro, the English-language tape from Fox. I bought my first copy in 1994. I'm now on my third; the first two wore out in the classroom VCR, which eats a tape a semester whether it deserves it or not.

Kiki's Delivery Service, from Disney, which came out on tape last September with a new English cast: Kirsten Dunst as Kiki, Janeane Garofalo, Debbie Reynolds, and Phil Hartman as Kiki's black cat, Jiji. He died a few months before it came out, and it is a strange, lovely thing to hear him being so funny in it.

The others I have seen only on borrowed tapes. A colleague of mine, Annette, who teaches Japanese down the hall, brought back Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso from a summer in Japan, and we watched them in her classroom after school with no subtitles at all, Annette translating in a whisper. I understood every bit of it anyway. That's what good drawing does.

The only American version of Nausicaä I know of is a cut-down tape from 1985 called Warriors of the Wind, with a good deal of the film missing and the story changed. I'd steer you away from it. Wait for the real thing.

Miramax is bringing Princess Mononoke to American theaters on October 29, in English, with a script written by Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman comics I confiscated from a sophomore in 1991 and then read cover to cover over a weekend. (I gave them back. With a recommendation.)

The voices include Claire Danes as San, the girl raised by wolves, Billy Crudup as Ashitaka, the young prince, and Minnie Driver as Lady Eboshi, who runs the ironworks, along with Gillian Anderson and Billy Bob Thornton.

I don't know yet whether Portland will get it on the first weekend. If not, my husband Morris has agreed, with only a little sighing, to drive me to Seattle. I've been warned it is violent and not for small children; see my note for parents. I'll report back the first week of November.