| Zusammenfassung: | When Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Awayreached American theaters in 2002, children byand large were enthralled, but some of us adultswere confused. This English-language version ofthe original Japanese film bore the Disney logo,but it was clearly not Disney. It was longer, forone thing, with odd pauses during which thecharacters seemed to be pondering,¹ and theline between good and evil seemed blurred andshifting. On the other hand, it also did not fit theAmerican stereotype of Japanese animation--toodetailed, too expensive, and with a surprisingabsence of exploding robots. One thing aboutthis movie did strike a familiar note: like manyDisney features, it presented imagination as asometimes dark and dangerous thing.That imagination is both a gift and a curseis hardly a new idea; its double-edged presencein children's literature has long attractedscholarly attention. But for an animated filmto warn viewers of the hazards of somethingwithout which it could not begin to exist seemsdownright hypocritical. When the most creative,surrealistic animated images are made to servea story that preaches reason and restraint, theyseem almost to erase themselves, like the paththrough Tulgey Wood rubbed out by broomdogs in Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951).Disney publicity has never officially acknowledgedany ambivalence about its chief product;what would a commercial for a Disney movie ortheme park be without the word "imagination"or its near relative, "dream"? Yet even the post-Walt animated films of the neoclassic period,which began in 1989 with The Little Mermaid,may convey, in the tension between their picturesand their plots, a deep sense of unease.²
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