One of the things I’ll first admit about “Spirited Away” (Walt Disney Home Video) is that I liked it because of its weirdness. I also liked it because it’s one of the most visually inventive films I’ve seen in years and has high production values, both of which make it more than worthy of its best animated feature Academy Award.

“Spirited Away,” not to be confused with Madonna’s suckoeuvre “Swept Away,” is the story of a young girl named Chihiro, who along with her parents, stumbles upon an abandoned theme park near their new suburban neighborhood.

After a while, Chihiro’s father finds an open-air restaurant with no employees or other customers, though he does not hesitate to dig into the food. Her mother joins, though Chihiro senses danger.

When night falls, mysterious spirits begin to blanket the area. Chihiro then tries to look for her parents back at the restaurant, but finds they have turned into enormous pigs. Trapped in the spirit world, Chihiro finds work through the help of a young boy named Haku, who gets her a job in the bathhouse for the gods and spirits. Yubaba, a controlling spirit who owns the key to Chihiro’s destiny, manages this spirits-only Menards.

If that doesn’t sound like the filmmakers of “Spirited Away” weren’t hopped up on goofballs, I don’t know what does.

While I was watching “Spirited Away,” I felt as if there was this mixture of mindblowing fantasy and the feeling as though I were floating through the plot. The film starts as an appealing children’s story of a family embarking on a new life, followed by them exploring a strange land, and then an even more interesting scene in which the roles of child and parent are reversed. Chihiro is like a young mother telling her children that it’s time to leave, though they won’t listen.

Truly there are sights in “Spirited Away” that you must see to believe — scenes that simply cannot be described because of the wildly engrossing imagination this film aspires to. Some of these instances are simple, though most complex — such as Chihiro’s initial job as a worker in the elaborate water heater of the bathhouse.

This transpires into the first meeting of Yubaba, clearly the film’s most interesting character. Yubaba holds a great power — she’s able to coast like a leaf in the wind from one spot to another, make extravagant items out of mid-air and clean up after herself considerably well. She is essential to the plot, as explained in reasons above, but also because she ends up longing for much of the things Chihiro does as well, creating a massive character arc that isn’t typical in an animated feature.

Much of “Spirited Away” isn’t typical of your regular animated film. It delves into genuine emotion (meanings or ideas of love, hard work and universal desires of the heart among these), and doesn’t just skim over it, as you would have in most Disney-animated films.

The performances are just as dynamic had they been acted by a real person, and just in case I haven’t mentioned it, creates quite a visual feast that I wish had been present in another Japanese film I have watched recently named “Dreams,” directed by legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

“Dreams,” although blisteringly brilliant at times, lacked a linear storyline, which I believe hurt it greatly. “Spirited Away” doesn’t have much of a linear storyline, though it keeps an idea of the direction it’s going as an omnipresent force. Chihiro wants to be with her parents, though there are many diversions from this goal. Losing the many digressions that make up “Spirited Away” would alter much of its effect, whereas with “Dreams” I was longing for the credits to roll.

“Spirited Away” does take its sweet time, with a length of more than two hours — though I was engaged thoroughly throughout its duration. Despite one small complaint (a rather obnoxious voice supplement of its main character), “Spirited Away” is a sweet-natured departure from the brainless comedies and the masturbatory violent movies of contemporary cinema.

DVD content includes the featurette “Behind the Microphone,” where vocal stars of the dubbed English version such as Suzanne Pleshette and James Marsden talk about the tribulations they endured while working on this film. This featurette should be noted not only because it’s interesting to hear the filmmakers talk about how well they supposedly dubbed the film (an overall good job, at that), but also because you hear the narrator say “deep throat” in the same sentence as Suzanne Pleshette.

There is also a Japanese-made TV documentary that explores the background of the movie. While not terribly interesting in that it’s not produced any different from any other “Making-of” documentary on many a DVD, they do discuss some potent character origin and some more of director Hayao Miyazaki’s past work.