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#13 in Anime Films
of 14 ranked entries
Isao Takahata · Studio Ghibli · 2013
Takahata adapted a thousand-year-old folktale using loose, unfinished-looking watercolor animation instead of Ghibli’s usual polish, and the rougher style turns out to carry more raw feeling than a cleaner line ever could. Recorded specifics: released 2013, director Isao Takahata, studio Studio Ghibli. Panel highlighted a deliberately loose, painterly animation style unlike anything else in the Ghibli catalog, adapts one of Japan’s oldest folktales with genuine emotional depth and takahata’s final film stands as a genuine artistic high point. The reservation on record is the unconventional visual style is a departure some Ghibli fans found jarring.
Score breakdown
Each criterion is scored independently, then combined using the weights published on Anime Films.
On the record
| Released | 2013 |
|---|---|
| Director | Isao Takahata |
| Studio | Studio Ghibli |
| Runtime | 2h 17m |
| Rating | 8.9 |
Panel verdict
What it gets right
Where it gives ground
1 appearance
From the same list
Hayao Miyazaki · Studio Ghibli · 2001
Miyazaki built a bathhouse for spirits as a coming-of-age crucible for a sullen ten-year-old, and Chihiro’s quiet, unglamorous work ethic — scrubbing a literal river god clean — is the emotional engine, not the magic around it.
Isao Takahata · Studio Ghibli · 1988
Takahata opens by telling you both children die, then spends the rest of the film making that outcome unbearable anyway — a war film with almost no interest in battle scenes, only their aftermath on two siblings nobody is coming to save.
Katsuhiro Otomo · 1988
Hand-drawn on a scale nobody has attempted since, with lip-sync recorded before animation — almost unheard of in the medium at the time.
Satoshi Kon · Madhouse · 1997
Kon built a psychological thriller about a pop idol losing her grip on reality that deliberately blurs film, fantasy and memory until the audience is as disoriented as its protagonist — Darren Aronofsky has openly credited it as an influence.
Hayao Miyazaki · Studio Ghibli · 1997
Miyazaki refused to write a clean villain into an environmental fable, instead giving the industrial antagonist real, sympathetic reasons for wanting the forest gone, which is exactly what keeps the film’s conflict honest.
Makoto Shinkai · CoMix Wave Films · 2016
Shinkai built a body-swap romance around painstakingly rendered real Japanese locations, and the film’s late structural swerve into disaster-prevention urgency turned a charming premise into a genuinely moving one.
Mamoru Oshii · 1995
Asks what remains of a person once every part is replaceable, and refuses to land on a comfortable answer. The dialogue-free city sequence is the best four minutes in the genre.
Hayao Miyazaki · Studio Ghibli · 1988
Miyazaki built a film almost entirely without conflict — two sisters, a sick mother, and a forest spirit who mostly just naps — and the absence of stakes turns out to be exactly the point, and exactly why it has endured as comfort viewing for decades.
Top 49 rankings are editorial. Scores are produced from the published criteria on each list and are refreshed on the cadence stated there. Figures shown across this section are curated demonstration data.