I am looking for, ideally, a software utility that displays a graphical,
animated front-end for browsing and mining a database.

http://www.liveplasma.com 

is a very very good example of what I want - except that I would configure it
myself and point it at my own database.  (I already contacted the
above company but their software is not a utility and they are rather
busy with their own application)

I am looking for something that preferably does not require coding or
hiring the company to do custom work - but rather a utility that can
be configured (either via a UI or other setup parameters)
Thanks.

try Groxis - its like Liveplasma, but can point at whatever database you choose:

www.grokker.com

http://www.grokker.com/grokker.html?query=bruce%20springsteen&ACM=true&AmazonECS=true&numResults=250

be sure to click the "zoomable map" feature.

Also take a look at aquabrowser:

http://www.medialab.nl/index.asp?page=customsolutions/overview

in a library:

http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/

Thanks for the commend
Grokker looks interesting, but perhaps too complicated.  Certaintly is
it much more than a "utility" - but a full fledged enterprise
application.   Nothing I can download and play with ... and the fact
that they want to have a salesman contact me to talk about pricing
signals that this is such a big app that it requires a 1-1 sale.

Aquabrowser.  Not sure.  I have a pretty well stocked browser, and it
still was not able to run (this indicating that the regular user would
also have to spend time inspecting plugins and setup).

These are helpful.   Hopefully someone will come up with the best
answer/solution for my needs.  Thanks!

Still waiting ...

Thinkmap is your answer - a commercially available toolkit for
creating dynamic, visual interfaces to complex data.

http://www.thinkmap.com

Be sure to check out their visual thesaurus as an application running on their api.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/