I just watched a a few of my niece’s favorite movies and I absolutely loved them! I’ve seen Spirited Away, The Cat Returns and Howl’s Moving Castle. I have My Neighbor Totoro, but haven’t watched it yet.
I’m a total newbie to this genre, so what else should I see?
Can’t go too far wrong with The Castle of Cagliostro. (I don’t know how old you are, but on the off chance that you have a few years on you, you may recognize many scenes from the movie from the 1983 Stern laserdisc videogame, Cliffhanger.)
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime), by Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, they also produced most of the films you mentioned.
This film is more bloody and serious, IMHO, than Spirited Away.
Laputa, Castle in the Sky, is also from the same people, and also entertaining.
Well, since you seem to love Hayao Miyazaki films (he did Spirited Away, Howl’s, and Totoro), I’d suggest Princess Mononoki, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Castle in the Sky (Mononoki is amazing, not quite as good as Spirited Away, but really excellent.) Those should be a good start.
You’ve seen or have three of Miyazaki’s movies already – Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro – and been recommended another one, The Castle of Cagliostro.
Follow suit and get all the rest, especially (IMHO) Castle In The Sky, Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, Kiki’s Delivery Service.
Thematically, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away are probably the most complex, with layers of symbolism and meaning; Nausicaa and Castle In The Sky more straightfoward, but showing with the dark side of human ambition; and My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service are more light-hearted.
Themes of Man vs. Nature and the need to find a “third way” to reconcile or harmonize between the two dominate or underlie many of his works.
I see on preview that this is not a new sentiment. Take it to heart, you won’t regret it!
If you’re willing to get into Sci-Fi/fantasy related anime with more adult/violent content, I’d say Akira (a classic – see the wonderful opening sequence with the biker gangs of Neo-Tokyo in this YouTube clip) is a must-see of the genre. If you want to stay away from blood-n-guts, there’s Millenium Actress, a fictional bio-pic of a reclusive former movie star who is shown to have had a lifelong mystery man in her life… But, if you find you like the anime-style gore, there’s Vampire Hunter D.
And then there’s Grave of the Fireflies for a real tear-jerker of a post-WW2 movie. It starts out with two young children orphaned and starving to death, and gets much sadder.
I highly recommend Perfect Blue. It’s sorta Roman Polanski meets Rumiko Takahashi, only not so much Takahashi.
Twlight of the Cockroaches is an allegory about the second world war with the allies represented by live-action humans and the axis as animated cockroaches.
Grave of the Fireflies is an extraordinary animated film about a small boy and his toddler sister and their experiences leading up to and after the bombing of Nagasaki - based on material written from personal experience. (It’s probably the most heart-breaking movie you will ever see.)
ETA: I type slow.
I recommend “Only Yesterday” and “Whisper of the Heart” and “Porco Rosso”. With those three and the ones named above, you’ll have seen, arguably, the best Japanese animated films ever made.
I don’t know if the Axis vs. Allies WWII angle is really there… “Hans” is obviously meant to be German, but is really just a representative foreigner: the roaches and the people are all Japanese in Japan, and speak in Japanese to each other and to the human who lives in the apartment (with whom they have had a longstanding “peace treaty” and who basically treats them as pets). Hans, of course, doesn’t buy into the whole “living with humans” thing, and is vigorous and wily where the all-but-domesticated local roaches have gone soft.
If there’s any political undertone, it’d be a caution to the Japanese not to get too soft and reliant on external shielding from violence and destruction (read: relying on the US instead of rebuilding their own military), especially when that shield is a traditional enemy who’s only playing nice for now because he’s bored or otherwise preoccupied.
Looks very much like a Ghibli production. I thought it was one.
About two boys (cats) named Giovanni and Campenella. The cats act just like humans but appear as cats. Took me a while to get over the Italian names, and the fact that Giovanni is blue, but the story slowly unfolds.
I think it is best to just let the story unfold. Don’t read any reviews. When it is all over, I found in all kind of sweet.
Check out Castle in the Sky and Vampire Hunter D (the movie, not the 80s one). I thought My Neighbor Totoro was merely “meh”, and Grave of the Fireflies gave me a decent tug on my heartstrings, but didn’t flat out depress me like so many people said it would.
Spirited Away is definitely my favorite of all the ones I have seen thus far.
Two more movies that are worth seeing are Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika, both directed by Satoshi Kon, but quite different movies.
Then you might want to move on to TV series. There are so many that it’s hard to know where to start, but some that I really like are His and Her Circumstances (also known as Kare Kano), The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, and Zipang.
I can’t believe I’m not the first to recommend Night on the Galactic Railroad.
Unfortunately, the translating company has let the licence lapse, so it would be out of print, and was always fairly obscure, so it night be difficult to find. But it IS worth the effort.
I knew you guys would come through, thank you! I now have a bunch of these on order now.
Agreed on both points. I watched My Neighbor Totoro last night and while I thought it was pretty to look at, it was a bit too precious for my taste.
Can you all recommend anything that’s a bit more adult (and by that I don’t mean blood and guts or X rated – I’m thinking PG-13ish)?
I repeat, then, Mononoke Hime. Like they’ve written before, it is more serious (and more adult themes) than others from Studio Ghibli.
I agree with My Neighbor Totoro. I had high hopes, after seeing Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Castle in the Sky. I was disappointed and soon lost interest.
The aforementioned “Millennium Actress”, “Paprika”, and “Perfect Blue” by Satoshi Kon are sophisticated mind-bending psychological studies that play with the themes of perception, memory and identity. All of them are great movies but be forewarned that “Perfect Blue” is a pretty disturbing psycho-sexual thriller in the Hitchcock/De Palma tradition. “Tokyo Godfathers”, also by Satoshi Kon, is more of a straight-forward all-ages Christmas fable.
Getting back to the Studio Ghibli films, one not yet mentioned is “Only Yesterday”, which is a charming character study of a young woman and her reminiscences of country life. Subdued, introspective and beautifully animated.
A quirky, and very entertaining SF movie is “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time”, about a high-school girl who suddenly develops the ability to time-travel. Funny, romantic, and suspenseful.
Also very highly recommended is the SF TV series, “Cowboy Bebop”, about a rag-tag band of bounty hunters or “Cowboys”. Great action and drama with an awesome jazz-tinged soundtrack by the great Yoko Kanno.
All of those that I recommended are PG-13-type material. The characters in the Satoshi Kon movies are all adults (except for the homeless teenager in Tokyo Godfathers, who ran away from home because she stabbed her policeman father in a quarrel – not fatally, fortunately, because we hear from him during the movie.
Kare Kano and Suzumiya Haruhi are both set in high schools, but there’s fairly adult material. In the former, the two main characters finish up having sex with each other – those there’s nothing explicitly shown – and Suzumiya Haruhi spends a lot of her time undressing anothr student, and then dressing her up in lolicon outfits.
Zipang is the one with the most graphic violence, because it’s set in the Pacific Ocean on a late-20th-century Japanese Self-Defence Force cruiser (the Mirai) that’s gone back to immediately before the Battle of Midway (i.e., 1942). You see a few ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy being blown up by the Americans, and you see the Mirai suffering some casualties too, despite the Mirai out-gunning any other ship in the Pacific at the time, including the battleship Yamamoto, which exchanges a few shots with the Mirai. In spite of the unreal initial set-uo, it’s pretty realistic, and that includes sailors being killed during wartime.
I recommend Porco Rosso, a fairytale. With airplanes & set in the 20s-'30s, but a fairytale nonetheless.
I second the Cowboy Bebop series, and suggest the Lupin The 3rd series, which is at least as funny as the original Pink Panther films.
Princess Mononoke and Whisper of the Heart are my two favorites.
Nausicaa and Spirited Away are the runners up.
Whisper of the Heart, while completely different, has a relationship with The Cat Returns, so you might want to check that one out.
Let’s see…Vampire Hunter D the movie is a bit more bloody and I could watch it over and over without getting bored too quickly. I also enjoyed the anime Boogypop Phantom. It’s only 12 episodes long and it’s one of those animes that make you go “Whaaa the hell is going on?” in the beginning intentionally but wraps up well in the end. I’ll try to think of some more, I always keep forgetting anime that I’ve watched (so it must not have been that great to begin with. ;))
Not an anime, but you should definitely take a look at Battle Royale if you’re looking for a bit more blood.
koeeoaddi–give us some feedback.