As every parent knows, most “family entertainment” is no such thing – it’s more often preschool entertainment (a much easier sale) or adolescent entertainment, which, for boys, tends to involve toilet jokes and special effects, and, for girls, sexual dilemmas with a Nancy Reagan punch line. Niche marketing, like global warming, is a slow, inviolable process, melting consensus and leaving the Beatles as the only bulwark against complete cultural disunity. Let’s blame Michael Eisner.

You remember him: imperious CEO of the Disney empire, who chased Jeffrey Katzenberg from the magic kingdom; attempted to emulate Uncle Walt on television and rendered his base audience comatose; banned wine from EuroDisney; outsourced animated features to Pixar; and went an extra step by declaring two-dimensional cartoons obsolete. My own theory consigns decline and fall to the release of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996), based on two remarks by my then-7-year-old. As Frollo waxed insane before the fireplace, thinking of Esmeralda, my daughter asked, “Why is he so angry?” You try and explain. At the end, when Quasimodo – depicted as cute but pimply – united Esmeralda and Phoebus in marital harmony, she asked, “Is he their pet?”

Disney, despite the arrogance of his possessory credits and the suburbanization of his once-transgressive cartoon characters, more than anyone else stabilized the 19th-century tradition – once characterized by “Tom Sawyer,” “Little Women,” or “Treasure Island” – of inherited works passed on from one childhood to the next. His best animated features were morally righteous, mixing suspense, comedy, romance, and adventure with smart musical support, state-of-the-art techniques, and artful composition.

Where did it all go wrong? The Disney of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and “Pinocchio” understood that fairy tales are self-contained dramas, rife with malevolence and death. Subsequent generations of parents decided that the villains who chilled them would traumatize their children.Worse, those tenderized children took charge of the Disney studio and replaced visual comedy with pop-culture wisecracks, terror with melodrama, innocence with sentimentality, and illumination with didacticism.

Disney’s recent DVD releases lay out the terrain. “Lady and the Tramp” (1955), a pinnacle of Walt’s dominion, has lost nothing to time. “Chicken Little” (2005), a 3-D Pixar impersonation, died before it was hatched. Three films from Japan’s Studio Ghibli – Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) and “Howl’s Moving Castle” (2004), and Yoshifumi Kondo’s “Whisper of the Heart” (1995), written by Mr. Miyazaki – for which Disney produced American dubbings, inadvertently prove that 2-D animation is far from dead and that emotional commitment will always trump technique.

“Lady and the Tramp,” Disney’s first cinemascope cartoon feature, is exemplary despite a story so banal it hardly bears repeating. The sure tempo channels Chaplin: The animators knew exactly how far to take any emotional template – adorableness, slapstick,calamity, serenade – before switching to another, though 1950s timidity mandated a lot of gibberish about storks, birds, and bees to get around the unmentionable word “pregnant.” The ethnic humor is tame (unless you are a rat, a Siamese cat, or a maiden aunt, in which case protests may be warranted), the drawing accomplished, and the subtext invigorating as it motors over the pros and cons of freedom and servitude.

Lady, a cocker spaniel who occasionally reminds me of Alastair Sim,and the other dogs of the haute monde love nothing more than to be collared and licensed, though they draw the line at muzzles. Tramp, a scrawny mutt, makes the case for the open road,the unfenced world at large, the liberation from licensed behavior. In the end, Lady convinces him that life on the homestead is best – as he proudly sports his collar and their offspring, the result apparently of an all-nighter. The latter, which be gins memorably with vino and spaghetti, causes so much concern in the dog world that two canine neighbors propose marriage to save Lady’s honor.

The film is mired in two controversies, one of which is explored in a making-of documentary. Unlike Disney’s previous animated features, “Lady and the Tramp” was based on an original story, much of it developed in the 1930s by animator Joe Grant. He created Lady, her milieu, and the cats, but failed to create a love interest, something Disney recognized when he read about a devious birddog in a story by Ward Greene. Having fallen out with Grant, Disney deprived him of all credit (claiming Lady was inspired by his own dog) and paid Greene to write a novel based on the script of the uncompleted film so that he could pretend the film was adapted from the published story.

The other controversy concerns the music and the Eisner regime. Peggy Lee, who wrote the lyrics to Sonny Burke’s melodies and voiced four of the characters,was represented by an agent who included a proviso guaranteeing her royalties from future sources of distribution, like home video. When the studio refused to acknowledge her claim, she sued for $25 million and was eventually awarded $2.3 million in a judgment that was twice appealed by Disney and twice upheld by the courts. Her name doesn’t appear on the DVD box, though she gets her due in the documentary. If anyone deserves a possessory credit, she does – her treatment of “Siamese Cat Song,” “La La Lu,” and “He’s a Tramp” are the film’s wittiest touchstones, and highlights of the 1950s Hollywood musical. Oliver Wallace’s score enfolds them and other tunes, including “Home Sweet Home,” with fastidious elegance.

“Chicken Little,” by contrast, is a noisy, long-winded, witless, insincere amalgam that will displease children of all ages. One can imagine the writers trying to outdo each other with inside jokes that have all the freshness of “Saturday Night Live.” It’s not worth mentioning except as an indication of how alienated its creators are from the verities that once made Disney a dependable brand.

That position has been enjoyed by Studio Ghibli since the international success of Mr. Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” (2001). These films unwind at a far more leisurely tempo, with relatively little comedy and a strangely derivative approach to music (Mr. Miyazaki loves the lumbering, lyrical heavy strings of 1950s film scores). They feature humans as opposed to anthropomorphic animals – especially girl humans of about 14 years of age.

Perhaps the central quality of Mr. Miyazaki’s world is its spirituality. In American fantasies, spiritual elements are either explained away or experienced only by children; in Japan, spirits, ghosts, wizards, and witches are an accepted part of the landscape, and the wasteland that divides childhood and adulthood is more illusory than real. Evil exists, but is mutable, not absolute, and is often defeated by universal trust – a belief in the uncanny.

Of the current releases, “My Neighbor Totoro” has the most conventional plot: While their mother recuperates in a hospital, a father and his two daughters move into the country, where a benign forest monster and his eightlegged catbus solve their dilemmas. What is unusual is the children’s fearless embrace of adventure; deliberate comic timing of a sort that recalls Blake Edwards; and adult concurrence with childhood imagination. As always, there is the sheer beauty of Mr. Miyazaki’s images.

“Whisper of the Heart” is unique in my experience in that,notwithstanding a few fantasy episodes that could have been handled by computer graphics, the film might have been shot live with real actors. Set in and around a junior high school in West Tokyo, it involves a budding romance between a girl who wants to write and a boy who wants to make violins, set against the lost love of an old artisan. In this instance, most of the early promises of the supernatural are explained away, and though the faces occasionally suggest teenage girls in Archie comics, the sense of place is specific and convincing. One of the boys, frustrated by the heroine’s complaint, says,” I don’t speak girl code!” Messrs. Miyazaki and Kondo clearly do.

“Howl’s Moving Castle” is a more divisive work, a magnificently illustrated and complicated adventure packed with assorted parts from children’s lit, especially “The Wizard of Oz.” It features a prince turned into a scarecrow, a shape-shifting hero without a heart, and, sitting in for the tin man, the eponymous castle – a clunking patched-up ship waddling on chicken claws, with portals that can be tuned, like a television set, to various modes of reality. The castle and other machines suggest the unmistakable influence of the 1950s Czech animator Karel Zeman.

The wizard is an evil (or not) sorceress who wages war, the heroine a young milliner turned into an old crone (but whose age is shown to be in constant flux, depending on the emotional context of any scene), and the setting a fictitious fin-de-siecle Europe beset by wizards, witches, mollusk-like assassins, and terrifying airships that strafe city after city with firebombs. The problem is the final 15 or so minutes, which are so repetitive and complicated that the story seems to unravel when it ought to cohere. I’m not certain subsequent viewings won’t clear that up, but I know I wouldn’t want to have missed everything that precedes them.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears every second Tuesday in The New York Sun.