The Houston Chronicle November 04, 1999, Thursday 2 STAR EDITION SECTION: HOUSTON; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 909 words HEADLINE: Animator's creations stand on brink of U.S. breakout SOURCE: Knight Ridder Newspapers BYLINE: TERRY LAWSON BODY: "Princess Mononoke," opening Friday in America, could be the film that breaks the Japanese animation known as anime out of cult status and into the mainstream in this country. The film is from Hayao Miyazaki, quite possibly the most revered animator in the world. When playing Japan last year, Princess Mononoke was rivaled at the box office only by Titanic. To promote his amazing Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki appeared at film festivals in Toronto and New York, the first time the anime pioneer has been in North America in almost 20 years. His first visit - to Los Angeles - came on the heels of the success of 1979's The Castle of Cagliostoro, his first film as a director, when he was being wooed to work in the United States. "Fortunately," says Miyazaki, through his translator, "I escaped." This quip, along with everything else the silver-haired Miyazaki does in public, is captured by the documentary crew that has been following him for a year to make a film about his life and work. It is generally considered that Princess Mononoke is the pinnacle of both. The film's U.S. distributor, Miramax, is betting U.S. audiences will love it as much as the Japanese audience has. Earning $ 150 million in Japan, the ecologically themed epic set in the 15th century was topped at the Japanese box office last year only by Titanic. For America, Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein sought Miyazaki's approval to commission a new English-language script, then hired stars such as Claire Danes, Billy Bob Thornton and Minnie Driver to re-voice the characters. Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, the self-contained animation studio that is home to Miyazaki and other anime masters, demanded approval of the script and the casting. The director says it is inevitable that his movie, hailed in Japan as a masterwork, will be changed by translation. "Shakespeare, unfortunately, is not the same in Japanese as it is in English," says Miyazaki, 58. "Not, of course, that I would ever equate myself with Shakespeare. But there are cultural changes that are inevitable, no matter how scrupulous one tries to be." What was more important to him, he says, was that the film not be edited. "Making any cuts in this film was unacceptable," says Miyazaki. "This I could not approve." That proved problematic for Disney Studios, which has a worldwide distribution deal with the Japanese production company that releases Miyazaki's movies. For one thing, Princess Mononoke runs 2 hours and 13 minutes, almost an hour longer than many U.S. animated films. Also, the film has several violent scenes in which extremities are severed and blood is plentiful. So Disney has given the job of promoting Miyazaki and anime to Miramax, its independently operated subsidiary. "God bless the person who can tell their stories in 90 minutes," says Miyazaki. "But I could not, epecially in this story, which is very complex. The violence, this was something new to me, because my movies do not usually have this. This particular story required it, however. And I believe it belongs in it. So I insist it remains. In your country, it is thought that all animation must be acceptable for very young children. That is not the case in Japan. There, animated movies are not always for children." It is, in fact, a popular misconception in the West that all anime is violent and sexual. This is due in part to the cult that has grown around anime, which tends to be made up of the same teen-age and young adult males who are drawn to fantasy and science fiction. But even though Miyazaki's interest in cartooning and animation was spurred by the post-World War II explosion of manga, the Japanese comic books read by adults, his films have always tended more toward the whimsical. Prior to Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki's most acclaimed work was My Neighbor Totoro, in which two little girls are invited into the wondrous world of creatures called Totoros, who soar above the natural world on spinning tops. "I was very in love with (Hans Christian) Andersen's The Little Mermaid when I was a child," says Miyazaki, whose father ran a company that manufactured airplane parts for the Japanese army's Zero fighters. He says his earliest attempts at drawing comics were almost always devoted to stories of girls, and, according to anime expert Helen McCarthy's new illustrated biography Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Stone Bridge Press, $ 18.95), he fell in love with the heroine of the first color animated movie produced in Japan, Legend of the White Serpent. Miyazaki majored in economics at a prestigious university, but says he didn't really study because he had no interest. Still, he expected to become part of Japan's economic revival, mostly, he says, "because I had no confidence in myself as an animator. To be truthful, I still have no confidence. I still believe everything I do is terrible. I always have to be convinced otherwise." This opinion obviously was not held by the studio that hired him after he graduated from the university, where he rose from in-betweener - the person assigned to fill in the hundreds of animation cells between the first and final frames of any action movement - to key animator on a popular television series. Miyazaki is curious to see how the West responds to Princess Mononoke, but says its failure or success will not affect his desire to "tell truths in an emotional, involving way." GRAPHIC: Photo: Hayao Miyazaki refused to allow "Princess Mononoke" to be cut when translated for American audiences. (color)