If possible, I prefer breaking the long journey between Cleveland and Japan with an overnight stopover in California to ease problems with jet lag. The last several years this travel pause has taken place in Los Angeles, and I have enjoyed getting to know the city fairly well as a result. Usually I rent a car and end up cruising on over to Santa Monica to wander along the Third Street Promenade there, to shop a bit, to eat at one of the city's many fine restaurants and to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

This year I learned to use the Big Blue Bus which runs from my hotel near the airport all over the Los Angeles area and as a result (for seventy-five cents a trip!) was able to get everywhere I wanted WITHOUT having to put out the money for a rental car!

I also took advantage of my forty-eight hours here to see "Spirited Away," a film that hasn't yet opened in Cleveland ('though it will be showing at the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights beginning next week). This is the anime ("animated film") by Miyazaki Hayao which broke all box office records in Japan earlier this year and which was the first animated film ever to be awarded a Golden Bear at the Cannes Film Festival.

The film was absolutely fantastic, and I urge everyone reading this to plan to see it! Miyazaki has created a truly original masterwork, one pulling together imagery and icons from a host of different sources. He includes not only inspiring figures drawn from traditional Japanese religion and mythology but also incorporates elements from contemporary popular culture, from Chinese and European sources, even Disney and the Muppets!

The plot is complex; and the various levels of meaning, intriguing. I haven't heard the film described as "postmodern" but would label it that without hesitation. The pastiche he pulls together is amazing in its ability to transform the expected into a mysterious and never-fully-explained-but-wonderfully-coherent story line with incorporated echoes of "The Wizard of Oz", earlier Miyazaki anime, truly funny bits of humor and high-minded morals.

In "Spirited Away" perseverance, persistence, good manners, loyalty, love and devotion are all rewarded; and the heroine at the center of the action matures "realistically" and convincingly over the course of the two hour film. Even the youngest children in the audience were enchanted; and the adults, if anything, appeared to enjoy it more than the kids!

Seldom does an animated film come along exhibiting the mastery of the form's possibilities as well as this film does. Go see it -- and take your friends!