Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. What's next?

Cafe Society
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I love Disney and Pixar films, and wanted to give anime a try, though it’s a style I’ve always been a bit cynical about. The character drawings I’d seen seemed rather … samey. Big eyes, little mouth, odd hair colors, tiny girly voices, and they all seemed to focus on wars or fighting. But I figured I was only seeing the stuff that’s popular with kids, bad TV exports or video game tie-ins, and perhaps I wasn’t being fair. So this week I watched my first two anime films, those being two of the most critically acclaimed, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.

(Actually maybe I shouldn’t say these were my first. Way back in the late ‘80s I sometimes watched this bizarre cartoon, late Friday nights on a PBS station, that was so odd I couldn’t look away. Featured a train that flew through space, a weird lookin’ kid, and a tall elegant woman wearing a Russian fur hat. Anyone know what this was? Sweet Jeebus it was freakish!)

Anyway I greatly enjoyed both films – probably Princess more than Spirited Away. Gorgeously animated with unique and thoughtful storylines, and the English dubs were with quality actors, not giggling twits. I’m unfamiliar with Japanese mythology, and for that matter I’m not very ‘up’ on the culture as a whole, and I found the newness entrancing. My favorite aspects of both these movies were the relationships between the two pairs of leads (though the apparent love story in Spirited Away was a bit oogy, considering the girl was like … what, ten or so?), and the touching interaction with sympathetic animals/mythological creatures, such as between Ashitaka and Yakul(sp?) the red elk and Chihiru/Sen and ‘No Face’. The realism coupled with the grotesque otherworldly stuff fascinated me, though I preferred the former to the latter.

So other fans out there, what should I see next?

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Try out other stuff from Miyazaki who made Mononoke and Spirited Away. Nausicaa is probably the most similar in theme to Mononoke. His latest: Howl’s Moving Castle is also quite good. His other films like Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service are more children-oriented but quite enjoyable too .

Also check out the films by his colleague at Ghibli Studios: Isao Takahata. Grave of the Fireflies is a remarkably powerful film about two orphans in WW2 Japan. Only Yesterday is also excellent and if you like Japanese mythology you will probably enjoy Pom Poko.

Another filmmaker worth checking out is Satoshi Kon; I really enjoyed Millenium Actress which is about the life and career about a fictional Japanese actress. I haven’t seen his latest: Paprika but it’s gotten rave reviews.

There is lots of other good stuff including TV shows though I haven’t watched that many myself. Cowboy Bebop is a great show in its own right and probably ideal for someone new to anime.

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A heart-warming one would be Kiki’s Delivery Service

Paprika is cool, but it has some disturbing scenes and brilliant mind-fuck, which to me make it doubly cool :slight_smile:

Another recommend would be The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Voices from a Distant Star by Makoto Shinkai. Top-notch story-telling and very touching. I am not sure if it is out, but his latest work is Three Minutes and it could be very effective at making people cry (I was melancholic for an entire week after watching it).

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Sounds like Galaxy Express 999. I had no idea they brought the series over here, though, I only ever saw the movies when they aired on the Sci-Fi Channel a while back. I’d recommend them but I’m pretty sure they’ve been out of print for years.

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In addition to the above recommendations, I’d like to throw Castle Cagliostro onto the pile. It’s a Lupin III film, not Studio Ghibli, but still a lot of fun and probably the best of the Lupin movies.

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I wasn’t a huge fan, but some are absolutely struck by Grave of the fireflies. They say it’s one of the saddest movies ever made.

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My hubby is the anime lover in the house, but I’ve watched Kiki’s, Castle in the sky and have been a casual observer of some of the other series mentioned below.

But other ones that are good:
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is very similar to Princess Monoke
Castle in the Sky and Howl’s Moving Castle are good too.

Looking for series:
Cowboy Bepop and Samurai Champaloo, both good quick series.
Fullmetal Alchemist, funny and dark moments.

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The anime that I’ve found most like Spirited Away is Kamichu!, about a middle school student Yurie who tells her best friend that she has become a god at the start of episode 1. Although she’s a god, with access to the spirit world of her (beautiful) home town and the rest of Japan, she also remains a shy middle school student. The story is very sweet and gentle (apart from the incongruous episode 4, where she deals with an extraterrestrial and with the Prime Minister of Japan), including very nice depictions of the spirit world and of the city of Onomichi. Among the characters are a local god who wants to be a rock star, and a boy in Yurie’s class who she is in love with, but who doesn’t seem know that she even exists.

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If you like SciFi, I recommend the series Planetes. It’s about a group of misfit garbage collectors, in space! Fairly hard science mixed with pretty good drama. My favorite series.

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My #1 recommendation for anime has always been Metropolis. It’s very sci-fi, but has the beautiful look that Studio Ghibli is known for, as well as a “loss of innocence” theme and a killer soundtrack. (Ray Charles for the climax - BOOYAH!!) I don’t know anyone who has watched it and not liked it.

Fourthing Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s my second favorite anime movie, and for good reason.

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I watched the first 45 minutes of Porco Rosso the other day, and I really enjoyed it. It’s odd, but very good.

Another Ghibli film (though not Miyazaki) that was good was the one with the raccoons with giant testicles, I forgot it’s name but searching for that will get it for you. You’d think something with that description would be ridiculously bizarre, but it was one of the best animated films I’ve ever seen (the parade sequence and the response to it was amazing and also sad).

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Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro is possibly my favorite animated film ever. Absolutely fantastic.

Grave of the Fireflies is brutal. It’s a good film to watch once. Like Dancer in the Dark.

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Whisper of the Heart (Mimi wo sumaseba) is also from Studio Ghibli (Miyazaki was involved, but was not the director). It’s about a 14-year old girl who wants to be a writer, a boy who has checked out all her library books before her, and a statuette of an anthropomorphic cat. Oh, and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” in Japanese. Despite some of the promotional art, it’s not a fantasy at all, and it’s quite good. A related film, The Cat Returns (Neko no Ongaeshi) is a fantasy, supposedly the novel written in Whisper of the Heart.

Also seconding Nausicaa, with the caveat that I haven’t heard the English voice acting on any of these.

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I was going to join this thread to mention Whisper of the Heart. It’s a great movie and completely not what most people imagine anime to be. No giant robots or martial arts tournaments. It’s just a quiet story of a high school girl discovering what it means to be an artist.

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I quite enjoyed Howl’s Moving Castle (Nausicaa, on the other hand, I found boring). My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Grave of the Fireflies are also excellent.

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If you can deal with subtitles, I recommend Tokyo Godfathers.

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I think it is called pom poko Pom Poko - Wikipedia

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Yes, that’s it.

In the English dub, they call the body part in question a “raccoon pouch”. My 7 year old watched it, loved it, and didn’t pick up that it was supposed to be the animal’s scrotum. They are only referred to as testicles once in the subtitles.

I admit I rented it because of the hilarious clips of racoons smashing cars with their giant balls on Youtube, but that’s actually a small part of the movie and it’s a really beautiful, deep, and funny story with some amazing animation.

“Howl’s Moving Castle” is my least favorite Miyazaki movie I’ve seen yet. It was OK, and beautifully animated, but it seemed really incoherent and I just couldn’t get into the characters.

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Wow, thank you guys for the plethora of suggestions! I love having lots of new goodies to explore. I think I’ll start with Nausicaa and Howl’s Moving Castle, and then give Whispers of the Heart a try. Probably will check out Grave of the Fireflies as well, but I’m not emotionally up for something too sad at the moment. freekalette’s suggestion of Metropolis sounds good too. And 0Paprika, 'cause like CrazyChop I like a good mindfuck. So much to learn!

I should also try Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro; I vividly remember Roger Ebert going into ecstasies over the latter back on “At the Movies.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a kid’s movie – technically so are Disney and Pixar flicks (though the latter stretches the genre), but many work on additional levels and have more depth when you look at them through adult eyes.

One thing that intrigues me about the two I’ve seen so far is how even in Spirited Away, which takes place ‘now’ with a modern lead, the spirit world is taken for granted. For example, when Chihiru meets Haku and he tells her he’s a river spirit, she doesn’t question him; ditto when she sees a dragon and automatically intuits that it’s Haku. I guess part of it is Chikiru’s young age and all the things she experiences in a brief amount of time – I mean, if you’re gonna swallow your parents being turned into pigs, why strain at a kid turning into a dragon/river spirit? – but even so, maybe transformational magic is more prominent in Japanese culture? (As I said I’m embarrassingly ignorant about this, so please forgive me for sounding stupid.)

And again, the love story between a ten year old and an apparently ageless river deity seems … well, unorthodox, shall we say?

Another aspect of these two films that’s interesting is that they seem to cry out for sequels (in both cases the two leads end up apart with promises to see more of one another), but there don’t appear to have been any. Movies as popular as these made in the U.S. would never stand unsequeled; gotta respect that about Miyazaki.

Mister Armageddon – yes, that’s it!!! Galaxy Express 999, man. The title was only sorta familiar but a quick Google with images confirmed it. Wow, it was an older show than I realized at the time, from the late '70s. I never knew what the plot was, it just always seemed that the kid and woman were riding on this train never going anywhere. I suspect I didn’t watch whole episodes, just caught it after watching Whose Line is it Anyway on Channel NJN. This would’ve been … I dunno, 1987 or so? I don’t think I knew what anime or manga or any of that stuff was, so seeing these odd characters in an odder premise just weirded me out.

Anyway thanks again for all the recommendations – feel free to kee 'em coming.

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Another of my favourites. I think it would be hard to dub into English, partly because a bit is in Spanish (and unsubtitled for both Japanese and English audiences), and a bit is in the broken English of Miyuki (the high-school-age homeless girl) – who is speaking in English to the Spanish-speaking woman presumably because she assumes that all westerners speak English, and because she doesn’t know any Spanish anyway. I’m not sure how a dub deals with that sort of situation, but subtitles deal with it by not subtitling, since the original Japanese audience would not have had subtitles for it either.