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#14 in Anime Films
of 14 ranked entries
Makoto Shinkai · CoMix Wave Films · 2019
Shinkai followed Your Name with a climate-inflected romance and, unusually for the genre, let his teenage leads choose each other over saving the wider world from endless rain — a genuinely divisive ending that refuses the expected sacrifice. Recorded specifics: released 2019, director Makoto Shinkai, studio CoMix Wave Films. Panel highlighted rain and weather rendered with the same photorealistic detail as Your Name’s cityscapes, an ending that deliberately refuses genre convention and a propulsive, RADWIMPS-scored soundtrack that drives the film’s momentum. The reservation on record is the choice at the film’s climax remains genuinely divisive among viewers.
Score breakdown
Each criterion is scored independently, then combined using the weights published on Anime Films.
On the record
| Released | 2019 |
|---|---|
| Director | Makoto Shinkai |
| Studio | CoMix Wave Films |
| Runtime | 1h 52m |
| Rating | 8.5 |
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.