Will Bedingfield. The story, as per the Hayao screenplay, follows boarding schoolers Umi and Shun in early s Yokohama as they fight to save a clubhouse from demolition. All the while, the city is reckoning with the legacy of the Second World War and prepping for the Summer Olympics in nearby Tokyo.
A charming enough love story, full of nostalgia. Sophie Charara. Ocean Waves is a ponderous, poignant story about adolescence and strained friendships. This is a film about feelings, about thinking and about the subtle melancholy and drama of teenage life. James Temperton. The film that broke Studio Ghibli. And yet! My Neighbors The Yamadas has its devoted fans for a reason. All digital with experimental sitcom sketches literally about cake, caterpillars, card games and unicycles in the clouds, Matsuko, Takashi, Shige, Noburu and Nonoko live in playful, unfinished frames.
As wise as it is silly and a comforting palate cleanser for any intense Ghibli marathons. Directed by Hiroyuki Morita, this film lacks the magic of a Miyazaki film, but it also offers some interesting contrasts.
The world here is more realistic, the animation style somehow cruder. Still, a smart-talking cat and a rip-roaring adventure through the feline kingdom ticks a whole lot of boxes. Only Yesterday is directed by Ghibli's other genius director, Isao Takahata, best known for the tear jerking Grave of the Fireflies. It's a similarly realist drama, though thankfully more upbeat, about Taeko — an unmarried year-old woman who travels to the countryside to get away from city life.
The film flips between this period and her childhood as she grapples with the mundanity of her life in the city and the unfulfilled dreams of her childhood. Directed By: Isao Takahata.
Critics Consensus: Gentle and nostalgic, From Up on Poppy Hill is one of Studio Ghibli's sweeter efforts -- and if it doesn't push the boundaries of the genre, it remains as engagingly lovely as Ghibli fans have come to expect. Critics Consensus: Exquisitely illustrated by master animator Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle will delight children with its fantastical story and touch the hearts and minds of older viewers as well.
Directed By: Hayao Miyazaki. Directed By: Tomomi Mochizuki. Critics Consensus: Sweetly charming and beautifully animated, The Cat Returns offers anime adventure suitable for the very young and young at heart.
Directed By: Hiroyuki Morita. Critics Consensus: When Marnie Was There is still blessed with enough visual and narrative beauty to recommend, even if it isn't quite as magical as Studio Ghibli's greatest works. Directed By: Hiromasa Yonebayashi.
Critics Consensus: While not Miyazaki's best film, Ponyo is a visually stunning fairy tale that's a sweetly poetic treat for children of all ages.
Critics Consensus: With its epic story and breathtaking visuals, Princess Mononoke is a landmark in the world of animation. Directed By: Yoshifumi Kondo. Critics Consensus: My Neighbor Totoro is a heartwarming, sentimental masterpiece that captures the simple grace of childhood. Critics Consensus: Visually lush, refreshingly free of family-friendly clatter, and anchored with soulful depth, The Secret World of Arrietty lives up to Studio Ghibli's reputation.
Critics Consensus: With a storytelling palette as rich and brilliant as its animation, Castle in the Sky thrillingly encapsulates Studio Ghibli's unique strengths. In other moments, they tap into their shape-shifting abilities to take human forms because, as they say, anyone can learn shape-shifting. That's how the film lures in its audience: the jovial concept gives way to the more serious topic of man's colonization of nature.
A suburban development lays waste to the tanuki's forest, pitting these creatures against humans in a war to save their home. Though Ponyo is decidedly aimed at a younger audience, the tsunami that Ponyo's father sends to retrieve her makes for one joyfully inventive sequence. There are no flying pigs or playful forest sprites in Only Yesterday , but Isao Takahata's understated drama has a magic all the same. Its simple plot seems more akin to a Sundance coming-of-age indie than an animated tale, following a year-old city dweller as she journeys to the countryside by train and reflects on her childhood.
For years, the film was hard to find, and although it debuted in Japan in , it didn't get a U. But although Only Yesterday may not be one of Ghibli's marquee titles, it has a quiet, contemplative brilliance, mixing memory and reality to craft a poignant story of what it means to grow up. It's nice to know that Hayao Miyazaki is planning to direct at least one more film , because this biopic of Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi always felt somewhat muted for a final statement.
It's easy to see why Miyazaki related to Horikoshi, given their shared love of flying machines and the creative similarities between artists and engineers, but it would've been interesting to see more direct contemplation of how "beautiful dreams" become weapons of war as art is twisted out of its creators' hands.
Instead, The Wind Rises focuses more on the doomed romance between Jiro and his consumptive crush Naoko in an effort to show that just because you know how a journey will ultimately end doesn't mean it isn't worth pursuing. If the wind is rising, then we must try to live. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is also the tale of Isao Takahata, one of the three co-founders of Studio Ghibli who passed away in Takahata believed animation could reach certain depths of reality that live-action could not.
Kaguya is based on The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter , a book he read as a child about a bamboo cutter who discovers a miniature girl within a stalk of bamboo who grows to become a woman of great beauty. Takahata didn't want audiences to be distracted by a more realistic art style.
He wanted them to empathize with the princess, which is something he couldn't get from the book on first reading. So, he embraced a watercolor aesthetic, one that he hoped would allow viewers to "vividly imagine or recall the reality deep within the drawings.
She also loves flying, as you probably could have guessed. Most notably, the characters are often wearing COVID-ready face masks to protect themselves from the poison atmosphere of the so-called "toxic jungle" that has been spreading across the world ever since a long-ago armageddon known as the Seven Days of Fire glimpsed briefly and horrifically in the opening credits.
Although the title invokes Totoro, My Neighbors the Yamadas eschews fairy-tale creatures in favor of hilarious and heartbreaking vignettes from everyday family life.
That's not the only way it differs from typical Ghibli fare. This Isao Takahata film is animated in a unique style more reminiscent of newspaper comic strips than the fantasy epics that populate the rest of this list. My Neighbors the Yamadas was perhaps a little too unique for Japanese viewers, who rejected it at the box office, but its stylistic experiments have stood the test of time.
Though not as well-known in the U. Final Fantasy and related video game franchises are nearly unimaginable without Castle in the Sky , which had a foundational influence on the steampunk genre as a whole. But for all that iconography, the story of a girl named Sheeta who falls from the sky and inspires a boy named Pazu to pursue his father's dream still contains elemental magic. One of the most fascinating things about the floating civilization of Laputa is its relationship to the struggle between nature and man-made technology that dominates so much of Ghibli's work.
By the time Pazu and Sheeta finally reach it, they find the castle's automatons already overgrown with plants. Not even the imaginary zenith of human civilization can overpower nature forever. With this coming-of-age classic, Miyazaki introduced one of Ghibli's richest and most lovable protagonists.
From the moment we meet Kiki, a wide-eyed witch trying to find her place in the world, she's eager and ambitious, but also grounded by self-doubt. She leaves home and sets out for the big city, with nothing but a broom and a black cat for company, and the result is a tender, sympathetic portrait of a girl's first forays into independence — and all the awkward fumbles that can come along the way. Kiki's journey is a reminder that strength and vulnerability can fly hand in hand, and sometimes, all you need is a little bravery to take to the sky.
The film, about a young woman cursed with old age who finds herself keeping house for a wizard in a roaming fortress, got a lot of love at the time, but then there are those who find it doesn't quite match up with the other work from Miyazaki. Nevertheless, it remains one of the filmmaker's most enthralling, inventive pieces. That's because he made it his own.
It's his now. Howl's imagines a fully realized world of magic, demons, and whimsy, but also the horrors of violence and war. It's about change and growth for Sophie as she journeys to find her own beauty and love, but also Howl, the lonely wizard thrown into a human war he never asked to be a part of.
Miyazaki brings a vibrant palette with enough creative reimagining to dazzle and evoke childlike awe even in adult audiences. For a film set in such a specific time and place, Porco Rosso has aged remarkably well. Chief Film Critic. He said he wanted to do another film, so we had to get our employees back. What we decided was that this time, with his new hand-drawn animation film, we are going to approach it with smaller numbers of animators over a longer-term period. Nearly 50 animators worked on that film, though Ghibli hired them from all over the world — America, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and France.
Home Directors. Jan 5, am PT. By Peter Debruge Plus Icon.
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