This is one of the lovingly hand-crafted works of Hayao Miyazaki, often called the greatest of the Japanese animators, although his colleague at the Ghibli Studios, Isao Takahata, may be his equal. Remarkable that ''Totoro'' and Takahata's ''Grave of the Fireflies,'' now both in my Great Movies selection, were released on the same double bill in 1988. Miyazaki has not until very recently used computers to help animate his films; they are drawn a frame at a time, the classic way, with the master himself contributing tens of thousands of the frames.

Animation is big business in Japan, commanding up to a quarter of the box office some years. Miyazaki is the ''Japanese Disney,'' it's said, although that is a little unfair, since Walt Disney was more producer and visionary than animator, and Miyazaki rolls up his sleeves and draws his films himself. His ''Princess Mononoke'' (1999) outgrossed ''Titanic'' in Japan, and his newest film, ''Spirited Away'' (2002), outgrossed ''Mononoke'' when it was released in July 2001. Of his nine other major films, those best known in the U.S. are ''Kiki's Delivery Service'' (1989), ''Castle in the Sky'' (1986), ''Warriors of the Wind'' (1984) and ''The Castle of Cagliostro'' (1979).

Miyazaki's films are above all visually enchanting, using a watercolor look for the backgrounds and working within the distinctive Japanese anime tradition of characters with big round eyes and mouths that can be as small as a dot or as big as a cavern. They also have an unforced realism in the way they notice details; early in ''Totoro,'' for example, the children look at a little waterfall near their home, and there on the bottom, unremarked, is a bottle someone threw into the stream.

The movie tells the story of two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. As the story opens, their father is driving them to their new house, near a vast forest. Their mother, who is sick, has been moved to a hospital in this district. Now think about that. The film is about two girls, not two boys or a boy and a girl, as all American animated films would be. It has a strong and loving father, in contrast to the recent Hollywood fondness for bad or absent fathers. Their mother is ill; does illness exist in American animation?

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