Wow! Thanks for that.
Another one (not Ghibli) where you can compare real locations in Tokyo with the anime, is the brilliant short work by Makoto Shinkai, The Garden of Words.
The artwork is simply exceptional, and it has a thought-provoking story with a surprise twist in the middle.
Combining the preferences of the twelve posters who expressed some, our collective ranking is
- Spirited Away
- Princess Mononoke
- My Neighbor Totoro
- Howl’s Moving Castle
- Kiki’s Delivery Service
- Laputa: Castle in the Sky
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
- Ponyo
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Porco Rosso
- The Wind Rises
- Whisper of the Heart
- The Cat Returns
- Arrietty
- Pom Poko
- Only Yesterday
- Tales from Earthsea
- When Marnie Was There
- Future Boy Conan
- Sherlock Hound, The White Cliffs of Dover
- From Up on Poppy Hill
- My Neighbours the Yamadas
I did this by doing a pairwise comparison of each movie with every other, and counting how many preferred the one at least as well the other. That effectively gives a “win-loss” for each movie, leading to the above ranking.
Maybe it’s just too sublime for me, because I thought the anti-war bits were heavyhanded and shoehorned in to the original story, and the rest of it failed to connect at all.
Suspicion: I dislike Howl’s because I am comparing it (quite unfavorably) to a book that I loved, whereas people who like it have never read the book and are looking at it in some sort of weird vacuum.
No, I’d read and reread Howl’s Moving Castle many times, long before I saw the movie (also read Castle in the Air). The anime is a separate thing, and I find it quite delightful in itself (unlike, say, the Ghibli Earthsea adaptation). So your suspicion is unfounded, in my case at least.
Beats me then. =/ My previous half-joking suspicion was that all the people who liked Howl’s were Howl/Sophie shippers who didn’t actually care about the movie (I have run into WAAAAY too many of these) but that doesn’t hold up in this context.
So I really can’t explain why I don’t like it. The movie just felt kinda empty to me. It was gorgeous (Although I found the re-use of “blob stuff” as a shorthand for evil, which was previously a thing in Princess Mononoke, to be a little unimaginative), but nothing resonated, and I left the theatre thinking “That was fine, I guess.”
The blob stuff was also used in Spirited Away. There’s a lot of visual and thematic shortcuts in the movies, where characters and ideas are presented in similar ways. While it’s fair to call them unimaginative, I prefer to think of them as a signature chords or familiar beats.
I like how magic was portrayed in Howl’s. The scene with the falling stars was magnificent. Overall, like how magic is portrayed in these movies compared to Hollywood movies, which focus on the special effects instead of the mystery.
I don’t think a couple who canonically end up married with a kid can really be consider “shipped” in media produced after said marriage is already written.
The blob stuff goes back to artistic representations from previous era, too. Look at the nuppeppō yokai, for instance.
This. I can’t say it’s my favorite Ghibli – that would be like trying to select your favorite child – but when I run into someone who knows nothing about anime it’s the one I pull out because the plot is a little more linear for our western tastes.
Also, fantastic aeroplanes.
I have not seen all of them–especially the later ones, but I’ll at least list my top five:
Princess Mononoke
Spirited Away
Howl’s Moving Castle
My Neighbor Totoro
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Also really enjoyed Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Grave of the Fireflies is among the best but it’s so sad I have a hard time calling it a favorite.
I haven’t disliked any that I’ve seen, but I would say The Cat Returns and Porco Rosso have ‘grabbed’ me the least.
I am SO looking forward to the launch of HBO MAX in a few months because they are supposed to have all the Studio Ghibli movies available to stream, so I’ll be able to fill the gaps on my list.
Shall I just call them “People who only thought Howl and Sophie were really cute together” then?
That works. Especially in a non-fandom context where some people have no idea what “shipped” even means.
We get most of them (21 movies) on Netflix. Well, will get, the first third was released this month, and by April they’ll all be there.
They’re not on Netflix in the US, unfortunately. But I already do HBO as well, so I won’t have to add a new subscription to see them, once HBO MAX starts up.
I’ve started listening to a podcast called Ghibliotheque. They devote an episode to each film, and they give some background about the studio and the production of the films.
An aside for Nausicaa, the manga/comic is superb. The movie only covers the first third or so of the whole story and I think is even better when having the context of the whole saga. Miyazaki wrote and illustrated it, highly recommended reading.
Miyazaki didn’t finish the Nausicaa manga until until 1994, ten years after the movie was released. It also wasn’t serialized in a regular manga magazine like Shonen Jump. It appeared in the pages of Animage, a magazine about anime and the animation industry. Like many “regular” magazines in Japan, it had one or two serialized manga in its back pages. Toshio Suzuki, later producer and general manager at Studio Ghibli, was one of the editors at Animage at the time and recruited Miyazaki to do a manga for the magazine. Nausicaa was launched under the assumption that it would not be made into movie, as making an animated movie NOT based on a well-known established manga was considered a risky business proposition at that time. However, the manga was so well-received that the decision was made to go forward with a movie.
A few of those not only aren’t Studio Ghibli, but are also TV series, or even specific episodes of TV series.
Ghibli actually co-produced one animated TV series. Ronja, The Robber’s Daughter was directed by Goro Miyazaki and released a few years ago. It was streaming on Amazon Prime last year (which is where I saw it), but I’m not sure if it’s there now.