Studio Ghibli Ranked Part One

Having already done my ranking of every Disney and Pixar film, it was inevitable I get around to the third of the big three animation studios. But the experience of watching every Ghibli film chronologically was quite different. While most Disney and Pixar films have a degree of lightness about them, the Ghibli canon is a denser, more challenging but extremely rewarding prospect. While there is a reductive viewpoint on Disney and Pixar which erroneously suggests all their films are sweetness and light, so there is a misconception that Ghibli films are all Fantasy Adventures, when actually that is based on just a handful of the most famous films by their co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki. There is a sort of unifying magic throughout the Ghibli filmography but the films themselves run the gamut from whimsical Fantasy to Action Epics, Teen Dramas to grim dissections of war. This is an amazing body of work and one I’ve thoroughly enjoyed diving into, but it’s also not one to take lightly. If you’re up for the Ghibli experience though, you’re in for a treat.

Part one of my Ghibli ranking features the lower half of my list, featuring some of the films that didn’t quite work for me and some which I had mixed feelings about. There are some hot takes here as several big films fall by the wayside early based purely on personal taste but I would encourage everyone to check out all these films regardless of my opinion. There’s something interesting to be found in every one and certainly if you love your Epic Fantasy your opinions on films like Naussicaä and Princess Mononoke will surely differ wildly from mine.

All entries contain spoilers.

24. Tales from Earthsea

Tales from Earthsea begins with a boy murdering his father. This initially appears to be an unprovoked attack but reading up on the history of the film’s production does a better job than the film’s own rambling narrative of clueing in the viewer to the significance of this plot point. Tales from Earthsea was the first film by Gorō Miyazaki, son of legendary Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki. Gorō’s background was as a landscape architect but after he drew impressive storyboards for Tales from Earthsea he was asked to direct the film. If this sounds like blatant nepotism, it’s worth noting that it was producer Toshio Suzuki who backed Gorō, while his own father was strongly opposed to him directing. The elder Miyazaki felt his son did not yet have the experience for such an important adaptation and, given that Gorō had no animation experience at all, he had a point, but the frosty reception Miyazaki gave his son when he pressed on with the project has been well documented, with the two said to have not spoken with each other throughout the production. It seems that the relationship between father and son was never exactly idyllic, with Gorō once referring to Miyazaki as a ten-out-of-ten director and a zero-out-of-ten father. When Tales from Earthsea was complete, Miyazaki reportedly sent Gorō a note saying the film “was made honestly. It was good”, a mild compliment which is at least some flicker of warmth to hold onto, especially since other reports alleged that Miyazaki had casually walked out of a premiere screening of Tales from Earthsea to have a cigarette.

As an outsider, it would be presumptuous of me to judge this father and son relationship based solely on second-hand information and my own western values. Suffice it to say, both men were validated to some extent when Tales from Earthsea became both a huge box office hit and the most critically savaged Ghibli film. It is well known that it won the Worst Movie award at the Bunshun Kiichigo awards, the Japanese equivalent of the Razzies. What is less frequently mentioned is that two years earlier Hayao Miyazaki’s own Howl’s Moving Castle was also chosen as their fourth worst film of the year. Still, amidst all this father/son drama, I can’t help but feel that the person who was really done dirty by Tales from Earthsea was Ursula K. Le Guin, the American author of the original Earthsea books. Le Guin had fiercely protected her work from prospective adaptors, including Hayao Miyazaki himself, who had long cited Earthsea as an influence. Le Guin turned down Miyazaki without having seen any of his work, assuming that an animated film would be in the style of Disney. Years later, having become a fan of the director, Le Guin granted Miyazaki permission to adapt her work but by that time he was immersed in directing Howl’s Moving Castle and barrelling towards another of his fleeting brushes with retirement. So Le Guin was eventually informed that the Earthsea adaptation would be helmed by the younger Miyazaki, her disappointment partially assuaged by a promise that the elder Miyazaki would oversee the production personally. This promise was not kept and Le Guin was dismayed to be presented with a film that fudged together bits and pieces from across the vast Earthsea saga, hammering them into a new plot and acting them out with characters who shared nothing but names with her own creations. The whole thing almost plays like a backstabbing trick pulled by Spirited Away’s Yubaba: “Oh yes, Miyazaki will direct the adaptation of your work. Sign here please… and now let me introduce… Gorō Miyazaki! Bwahahahaha!”

The extent to which I’m focusing on the production history of Tales from Earthsea is probably a clue to how I feel about the film. Its poor reputation aside, I’ve never been a fan of this kind of Fantasy story and, given that this precluded me from enjoying Princess Mononoke, one of Ghibli’s most celebrated works, I didn’t have high hopes for Tales from Earthsea. My one glimmer of optimism came in the disapproval of the Fantasy fans, which suggested to me that perhaps the dense world-building and convoluted plotting I generally find insufferable would be absent here. Certainly there is little world-building evident in this beautifully rendered yet flatly depicted landscape but unfortunately the narrative incoherence was firmly in place. Add to that characters who barely live up to that description and you have two torturous hours of rigid counters being moved around an ill-devised gameboard that seems to still be undergoing construction. The slow, meditative pace is something I generally enjoy so long as the film gives us something on which to meditate. Instead, we get utterly faceless characters who are super-serious about increasingly intangible subjects. Still, there’s one called Sparrowhawk. Maybe his daft name and unearned faux-gravitas will distract you from the fact that he’s basically an unwhittled plank.

In Japan, the Earthsea books are held in extremely high regard as the third big fantasy world alongside Narnia and Middle Earth. So while the belated release of Tales from Earthsea in the west might’ve annoyed a few Fantasy devotees, the arrival of this tepid reimagining of a widely loved world was a bit more significant in the homeland of the warring Miyazakis. Whether it was the family name or the box office take of Tales from Earthsea that prevented Gorō Miyazaki’s animation career from being ended by this film I can’t say but this was not the last Ghibli work by the young Miyazaki. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing we shall discover further down the line.

23. Earwig and the Witch

Poor old Gorō Miyazaki. In many ways he’s an interesting director, with his second film From Up on Poppy Hill being one of the best Ghibli films not directed by the studio’s founders, Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata. Unfortunately, that film was sandwiched between two productions that have come to be routinely and justifiably held up as the worst Ghibli has to offer. While Gorō’s debut Tales from Earthsea had been a lumbering bore, his third film Earwig and the Witch at least has a smattering of kooky personality, the highlight of the whole film being the anarchic explosion of its opening credits which encapsulate its surprisingly punky spirit better than the film that follows. Unfortunately, these invigorating tearaway tendencies are scuppered by the hideously rigid style of CG animation which makes every character look like a dead-eyed interloper from a computer game cut scene. 

The negative reaction to preview shots of Earwig and the Witch perhaps saddled the film with a partially-unfair barrage of preemptive negativity. But, while animated films can do anything live action can and more, a failed visual aesthetic is an extremely difficult obstacle for them to overcome. Earwig and the Witch looks lousy and it’s hard to prevent this from becoming a distraction when you’re trying to get immersed in the plot. But worse still, the plot itself is almost completely uninvolving, largely confined to a rather dull house and bereft of particularly notable events. Based on the book by Diana Wynne Jones, who also wrote the source material for the elder Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, Earwig and the Witch feels like it might’ve worked on the page but it would need a far greater injection of magic and storytelling verve to succeed on screen. One of the first scenes in the film features Earwig trying to get her cowardly friend Custard to follow her into a forbidden building in the dead of night. He says he’d rather stay outside, to which she replies that that’s fine if he’s comfortable waiting there alone. A few seconds later he’s all “W-w-wait for me!” and immediately we’re confronted with a new phenomenon: a Ghibli film mired in cliché.

With its brief runtime and flaccid story, Earwig and the Witch tries to rely on attitude, with a scrappy energy crushed by its lumpen animation and an upbeat Rock soundtrack which eventually leads to a series of climactic revelations about characters who have not been properly set-up in order for us to care enough. The ending is infamously anticlimactic, with practically every review I’ve read wondering why it cuts to the credits so abruptly. Rather than a completed film, Earwig and the Witch has the feel of a feature length pilot for a mildly promising TV series. Characters like The Mandrake, Thomas the cat and Earwig herself have some potential to be interestingly developed but after only 82 minutes they remain one-dimensional creations trapped in a hopelessly underdeveloped world. 

22. The Cat Returns

The Cat Returns, the only Studio Ghibli film directed by Hiroyuki Morita, was originally intended to be a 20 minute short to play as part of a theme park attraction. The only stipulation was that the story should star cats, so Hayao Miyazaki decided to use the cat characters Muta and the Baron from the Ghibli feature Whisper of the Heart. Also suggesting that the mysterious antiques shop from that film should be featured, Miyazaki commissioned Aoi Hiiragi, author of the original manga of Whisper of the Heart, to create a manga for this new cat project. Ultimately, the theme park cancelled their order so Miyazaki took the work that had been done already and decided to extend the short as a testing ground for future Ghibli directors. Morita, who had worked as an animator on My Neighbours the Yamadas, was put in charge of the project and The Cat Returns was born. If you’re thinking that such a rocky path to the screen would result in a rather awkwardly pieced-together end product, you’d be right. The Cat Returns feels hurried, its short runtime feeling like an admission of the dearth of decent material and its rounder, simpler style feeling a bit underwhelming amidst the Ghibli canon. Still, The Cat Returns is also a hard film to dislike, providing a good-natured little adventure that entertains even as it consistently fails to wow.

The Cat Returns’ relationship to Whisper of the Heart is tenuous. A very different film from that grounded, real-world story, The Cat Returns shares a couple of characters with Whisper of the Heart but it drops them into a fantasy world of talking felines and secret kitty kingdoms that clashes with their origin. An assumption that has been made by many is that The Cat Returns represents a creative piece written by Whisper of the Heart’s aspiring-writer protagonist Shizuku. That would explain why the Baron and Muta are in there, having inspired these fanciful reimaginings. Oddly, The Cat Returns is at great pains to make clear that the Baron is an ornamental cat come to life, rather than just have him be an actual cat in this world. This feels like a forced justification for the inclusion of the antiques shop from Whisper of the Heart, which has absolutely no reason to be in there and further complicates the differentiation between the worlds. Still, ultimately it doesn’t matter since the two films can easily be taken separately. Whether or not you’ve seen Whisper of the Heart has virtually no effect on viewing The Cat Returns, other than making you remember how much better the earlier film was.

For all its flaws, The Cat Returns knows what it is and leans into that. The first Ghibli release following the eye-poppingly elaborate Spirited Away, it is under no delusions of matching that aesthetic and, in its own scrappy way, The Cat Returns’ cheaper animation is quite charming. On the other hand, many of the cat characters here are a tad unappealing. The anthropomorphic version of Muta is a bit of a disaster and the Cat King is spectacularly ugly, his goofball expressions reminding me of Japanese TV animations from my youth like Wowser and Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds. Only the sleek, handsome Baron stands out and he deserves a much better story than this one. I found myself wishing they’d leaned into the handful of swashbuckling elements here rather than the haphazard whimsy that never quite seems to find its purpose. The protagonist Haru seems to have undergone a positive transformation by the end of the film but the journey towards it is unconvincing, to the point where you might wonder where her new self-confidence has supposedly come from. There’s no sense of satisfaction when the viewing experience is over. The Cat Returns feels like what it is: An overextended and poorly conceived short film which is one of the few Ghiblis that feels like it will appeal solely to children. As I said before, it’s a hard film to dislike but it’s an even harder one to love.

21. Princess Mononoke

Kurt Vonnegut was of the opinion that the Sci-Fi genre has the best ideas and the worst writing. Generalisation though it is, I feel approximately the same way about Epic Fantasy. The impressive intricacy of the worlds created for this genre often becomes the focus at the expense of strong characters or convincing dialogue. In their place stand mirthless figures that are cool to look at and seem to communicate exclusively in chunks of expository dialogue so large and chewy that they ought to carry steak knives in the leather sheaths that their costumes inevitably sport. This matters little to those who can wrap themselves up in these ambitious narratives to the extent that they practically become extras in them but for those looking for the recognisable warmth of human experience, these coldly self-serious worlds often feel alienating and unknowable. The Fantasy films of Studio Ghibli are mostly of the kind I love, filled with humour, magic and adventure, but occasionally the studio would have a bash at the straight-faced, lore-saturated variety of Fantasy film I can’t abide. It’s clear I’m in a minority here and these films are often singled-out as among Ghibli’s most impressive works but, just as Naussicaä of the Valley of the Wind largely left me cold, so the universally acclaimed Princess Mononoke is a film I can comfortably file alongside the Lord of the Rings trilogy as something I never want to sit through again.

Princess Mononoke was a hugely important film in introducing the work of Studio Ghibli to a wider international audience. Its dark, gory, long-winded style is oddly unrepresentative of Ghibli’s oeuvre, which may explain why the brighter, more accessible Spirited Away was the film that really made the studio a household name in the west, but Princess Mononoke’s grim, disturbing content did fit with the one-dimensional mid-90s view of Japanese animation held by the underexposed inhabitants of our unenlightened shores. Its hefty environmentalist content also caught the tail end of the decade’s fleeting obsession with eco-tales, before the plastic-wrapped lovers of deforestation held a meeting where someone said “Hey wait, couldn’t we just deal with this blatant inconvenience by denying it?” Cynicism in the face of well-intentioned calls for a greener future was taking hold by the time of Princess Mononoke’s original release, a sign of why films like this were needed then and are still needed now, although the much more fun Pom Poko from several years earlier would be my go-to Ghibli environmental tract. 

All my negativity does stem more from an issue of personal preference more than failings on the film’s part, although strip away the excesses of plot and I do think you might find some pretty bland main characters underneath (San is significantly cooler as the silent and mysterious figure of the first hour). Still, there is much to admire and even enjoy in Princess Mononoke. It is undoubtedly one of Ghibli’s most visually striking films, filled with forest spirits and awe-inspiring gods that are as ravishing as their backstories are boring. There is also at least an hour of runtime here that held my attention and kept me entertained. Ashitaka’s battle with a boar demon, his acquisition of a cursed wound, his journey to find the Great Forest Spirit, his first encounter with San (aka the titular Princess Mononoke) and their escape from Iron Town all play out beautifully and I began to settle in with hopes of enjoying Princess Mononoke as much as everyone else seems to. But at this stage we start to encounter more and more gods and spirits, all of whom talk through gritted teeth with a silly faux-gravitas and the dialogue becomes festooned in the sort of gobbledygook and inches-thick-exposition that exacerbates the debilitating Middle Earth flashbacks I long thought I had under control. At this point I realised there was still 75 minutes to go and my genuine enjoyment of the first hour quickly turned to bemusement and boredom from which I never quite recovered, even when creations as undeniably beautiful as the Nightwalker crossed my screen.

I’m not going to say that Princess Mononoke is a bad film. I don’t believe for a second that it is. But it is my least favourite Ghibli film thus far, probably for the exact reason it works so well for fans of its genre. Its determination to push further and further into a tone and style I dislike probably makes it one of the best films of its kind but I wouldn’t know. In the case of Epic Fantasy I invariably find myself locked outside the city gates with no intention to scale the walls and only the hope that those on the other side of the drawbridge are enjoying themselves.

20. Ocean Waves

Several of Studio Ghibli’s early films were originally intended to be shorter TV featurettes but each time inspiration took hold and saw them opened out into full length features. With 1993’s Ocean Waves, Ghibli finally got their TV movie. The intention was to nurture the talents of younger Ghibli employees by creating a film solely by them, with a smaller budget and tighter schedule. Ultimately, Ocean Waves went over budget and over schedule and its young director, Tomomi Mochizuki, developed a peptic ulcer from the stress of the experience. Mochizuki was surely under a lot of pressure, given that his film was the first Ghibli production directed by someone other than founders Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata. The intention to produce something “quickly, cheaply and with quality” may have failed on the first two counts but Ocean Waves is certainly a quality piece of work in terms of its visuals and storytelling. It is the story itself which lets it down, a rather hackneyed teen Melodrama based on the novel by Saeko Himuro. The story of a new girl who transfers to a high school and shakes up the lives of two male friends is related with a certain sense of intrigue but it really goes nowhere of interest and the short runtime deprives the story of the adequate character development to make it engaging. In the final act, everyone suddenly starts smacking each other round the face yet there’s not enough clear motivation for even one half-hearted slap.

Mochizuki’s film makes for an interesting detour in the Ghibli filmography but it feels more like something from a different studio. As the least-viewed of all the Ghiblis, it has acquired a reputation as a hidden gem in some quarters. Sadly I didn’t find it lived up to that promise but, though it is a disappointment amidst such illustrious company, Ocean Waves shows promise on its own terms. If only it had a better story to work with.

19. Naussicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Naussicaä of the Valley of the Wind has a long, clunky title that trips over itself around the second “of” and stumbles to a clumsy conclusion. That’s a reasonable analogy for how I feel about the film itself. It starts well but diminishes the longer it goes on and the more that’s thrown into it. Naussicaä (as we shall hereafter refer to it for reasons of time and word count) is not officially a Ghibli release but it is generally considered as belonging in the Ghibli canon as it helped crystallise the founding of the studio while also establishing many of its stylistic and thematic trademarks. Hayao Miyazaki’s second feature film, based on his own manga of the same name, Naussicaä immediately displays his penchant for and natural ability with grand, sprawling Adventure stories. This is a mightily ambitious second feature and the results are never less than visually stunning. Miyazaki realises the visual details of his post-apocalyptic landscape with remarkable imagination and vision. Another of Naussicaä’s great strengths is its terrific score by Joe Hisaishi, establishing a long-running collaboration with Miyazaki that would lead to some of the most magical movie music of the twentieth century and beyond. Hisaishi’s score here combines an epic, rousing sweep with 80s synths and, despite the initial surprise at the combination, it really works. 

My problem with Naussicaä, then, is the screenplay. In putting across his epic Fantasy scenario, Miyazaki ends up bogged down in excessive and tedious detail. This is the sort of film where characters throw out dialogue like “and that was what caused the Seven Days of Fire” in the way you might slap extra relish on a burger. I understand some people eat this stuff up. I believe it is often referred to as “world building”, the art of creating a background story of greater scope so that people can take it way too seriously and argue about fictional minutiae as if it’s real. OK, I’m being snarky now, like my favourite Naussicaä character Kurotawa who gets all the best sarcastic lines and beautifully animated facial expressions. If I’m to look at this in a less jerky way, what I mean to say is that these kind of intricate Fantasy and Sci-fi worlds just don’t appeal to me. My heart sank when reading the list of influences on Naussicaä and seeing the twin terrors of Lord of the Rings and Dune but for many those very same reference points will send them scrambling to create a Netflix account immediately. It’s fair to say if that’s your cup of tea, you’ll probably love Naussicaä too and should disregard my review entirely (except for that bit). It’s never my intention to put people off watching films just because I didn’t like them but in the case of something like Naussicaä, I’d go as far as to say my opinion is genuinely of lesser worth. I’m not being self-deprecating there, I’m just recognising the limitations that this specific preference places on me in terms of judging this genre.

I should also point out at this stage that I didn’t not like Naussicaä. I was, in fact, very disappointed when I started to lose interest at around the forty minute mark because before that I was quite invested. I loved the scenes of Naussicaä exploring the valley and caves on her glider, even as she coughed up endless expository dialogue like hairballs. There’s a lot of information to get across in Naussicaä and this casual monologuing is preferable to an opening voiceover narration or caption (although for some reason Naussicaä feels the need to give us both of those things too). The introduction of Lord Yupa, the return to the populated area of the valley and the initial invasion of the Tolmekians were all gripping, with a couple of brilliant beats that rank with my favourite Ghibli moments. Naussicaä’s introduction to the young fox-squirrel Teto in which she allows him to bite her finger until he feels comfortable is a beautiful piece of character work, establishing Teto as a companion who serves to quietly and movingly reinforce Naussicaä’s gentle wisdom and protective instincts, rather than as the wisecracking comic relief Disney would doubtless have made him. The other great moment comes as Lord Yupa prevents Nausicaä killing an invading Tolmekian, thrusting his forearm in front of her blade and delivering a calm rebuke to the invaders as his blood slowly drips down her sword. It’s as vivid a moment of dedicated pacifistic badassery as I’ve ever encountered.

Naussicaä is often criticised for its heavy-handed environmental message but I don’t have a problem with that. As well as being ahead of its time for 1984, a little before our screens became flooded with animated eco warriors, it is also patently necessary in a world where we’d rather complain about the preachiness of environmental warnings than actually do anything that might necessitate fewer of them in future. For me (and again, I realise this is an almost perverse reversal of the traditional inclination), it is when the action escalates that the film becomes muddy and dull. A great big action-packed finale is exactly where Naussicaä should be destined to go but it nips in the bud the excellent character development of the earlier scenes. Naussicaä herself, though far from the brash, one-dimensional approximation of a feminist heroine that littered so many male-helmed projects of the era, feels sadly undernourished as a character. Her many positive qualities make her easy to like but there is not enough time to develop them very much. Miyazaki gives us tantalising snatches of elaboration, including a gorgeous flashback dream sequence, but they amount to very little other than reaffirmation of her blandly rendered heroism. The moment in which she weeps at having glimpsed her potential capacity to kill is the highlight but it is breezed past too quickly and doesn’t resurface in any significant way.

The Ghibli canon generally tends towards the sort of Fantasy with which I can get on board, a lighter, brighter variant with less full-on action sequences and more humour. Naussicaä is not humourless nor devoid of warmth but its grimmer dystopian vision and more brutal battle scenes don’t bring the same level of magic for me as Miyazaki’s more whimsical or intimate works. Make no mistake, you’ll find a brilliant director already impressively honing his skills here. Naussicaä of the Valley of the (Long) Wind(ed Title) just isn’t my kind of Miyazaki film.

18. The Wind Rises

The Wind Rises was intended to be Hayao Miyazaki’s final film. Although he had made numerous attempts to retire in the past, this time he seemed absolutely sure it would take. It didn’t, of course, but perhaps that utter conviction was what led to Miyazaki crafting what is, in many ways, the perfect finale to his career. The Wind Rises is a fictionalised biopic of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, a subject that allows Miyazaki to indulge his fetishistic obsession with aviation to the extreme. On the positive side, this results in a film in which you can see the love and enthralment poured into every frame. On the negative side, for audience members who have little interest in aircraft and their construction, The Wind Rises can feel like a bit of a slog. To further complicate matters, I’m not the biggest fan of biopics in general and, while Miyazaki injects this story with numerous inventive dream sequences and some striking scenes, the plodding melodramatic pitfalls and lengthy expository dialogues are all still as present as in The Wind Rises’ live-action contemporaries.

I ended up giving The Wind Rises 3.5 stars but, as with films like Princess Mononoke and Naussicaä, I feel it’s a film worth more stars than I am able to award it. Were I not ranking all the Ghibli films, I’d probably have left this one unrated as a film I admire but struggle to engage with. It is clear right from the outset however that this is one of Miyazaki’s most beautiful films, with the scene of the Great Kantō earthquake alone making it worth watching. I do feel that there are a couple of problems that go beyond my own personal dislike of biopics though, namely some thin characterisations and another flabby love story. These issues have popped up in previous Miyazaki films and are often compensated for by the fantastical narratives. But given that The Wind Rises is such a dry traipse through aeronautical minutiae, there’s little to balance out the flat emotional content. The death of Jiro’s wife from tuberculosis is based on a real event so it may sound heartless to dismiss it as playing like a throwback to manipulative tropes from 80s and 90s tearjerkers, but Miyazaki fails to tap into the necessary emotional resonance to emulate the real world gravitas of the tragedy depicted. This too comes down to character, with Nahoko kept out of the story for far too long a stretch and then painted with such intangible brushstrokes that her death has all the impact of an animator knocking off for the day. 

In my attempts to analyse my personal disconnect with The Wind Rises, I have focused too much on the negatives. I still think it is a fine film but ultimately it also comes a cropper in its attempts to reckon with the political side of its story. This is, after all, a film about a man who loves building beautiful planes that will ultimately be used for atrocious purposes. Miyazaki’s dialogue does touch on this and gives the issue a significant place in the film’s finale, but the writing seems in too much of a hurry to push past morality and land on a soft bed of fluffy idealism. Would you want to live in a world without the pyramids?, it asks, to which any sane person would surely respond Yes, if it saved the slaves. Still, there must be dozens of films out there that celebrate the creators of tools of war used by the allied forces so there’s probably an issue of nationalistic imbalance going largely unacknowledged in the west when it comes to the controversy that surrounded The Wind Rises. I also wonder if I would feel more inclined to defend the film’s viewpoint if I’d liked it more, a troubling question that only occurred to me as I write this, exposing my own subconscious reluctance to engage with difficult moral questions. In summary, though it wasn’t quite my thing, suffice it to say, if you have an interest in aviation then The Wind Rises will no doubt float your boat, if you’ll allow me to conclude a particularly jumbled review with an egregious mixed metaphor.

17. The Boy and the Heron

As a fan of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, I was initially very excited to hear about his comeback film, The Boy and the Heron. However, I began to notice a pattern emerging in my friends who had seen the film. They would all go in exhibiting the same excitement I felt, posting social media statuses about being about to watch The Boy and the Heron and then falling totally silent. While I hadn’t seen any negative feedback per se, their silence did seem to speak of a collective bewilderment. Although I try my best to reserve judgment until I see a film for myself, I couldn’t help but approach The Boy and the Heron with a heightened sense of caution, even though critical reviews had been largely glowing. At first I was pleasantly surprised as The Boy and the Heron appeared to be one of Miyazaki’s grittiest and most tightly focused films. For the majority of the opening hour I was preparing myself to join the admiring throngs who drove the film to box office success and Oscar glory. But then the second part of the film began and the film became mired in the dense, wild Fantasy inclinations that characterise some of my least favourite Miyazaki works. The moment the characters sink through the floor into an enchanted oceanic world, my hopes for another Miyazaki classic sank with them.

The Boy and the Heron is reportedly dense with autobiographical significance, with Miyazaki eschewing all consideration of narrative coherence by the second act, opting instead for abstruse symbolism which will surely reward multiple viewings for those looking to uncover the film’s secrets. I’m not averse to cryptic, symbolic films myself and The Boy and the Heron undoubtedly features some of the director’s most striking images and beautiful animation. At times in the taxing second hour, this is enough to carry the film but there is also a tonal problem. Miyazaki is working with a huge palette here, attempting to move between extremes of genuine horror and goofball whimsy but the two bleed together in an incompatible way, resulting in garish, repellent colours. There is a group of man-eating parakeets that just feel like the stupidest creations ever to appear in a Ghibli film, while the floating unborn human souls known as the Warawara feel like Miyazaki retreading old ground. This may be partially the point, given that I’ve seen some people refer to The Boy and the Heron as Miyazaki’s 8 1/2. Others have also uncharitably called this a Greatest Hits collection, which I don’t think is quite accurate. While there are some creations that evoke classic Miyazaki, there’s far more here that feels vibrant and new. The heron itself, for instance, is a phenomenal creature, all horrifying teeth and bumpy, disease-ridden gums. That these gums eventually reveal themselves to be the nose of the man who hides beneath the heron costume is just one of the film’s bizarre surprises, and one that is executed particularly brilliantly. And yet some of the story concepts, though probably stemming from a deep personal significance, just feel like the work of kids making up games in the playground. “Of course the pelicans couldn’t eat me. I have an arrow fletched with the feathers of the heron.” What?!!

Again, I hold my hands up to the fact that the Fantasy genre is often incomprehensible to me and the narrative leaps required might just be beyond my capability or level of interest. Then again, the leap required here seems to involve a mightily calamitous tumble, the like of which might challenge even Fantasy enthusiasts. Given that Miyazaki fan favourites Princess Mononoke and Naussicaä of the Valley of the Wind are towards the bottom of my list, I’m likely not the target market here. My favourite Miyazakis tend to be the lighter, more whimsical ones with a tighter grip on their plots. But my favourite part of The Boy and the Heron was its opening stretch, which was exceedingly dark, veering close to Horror and incorporating graphic images of self-harm and themes of depression and detachment. Maybe the problem is that I wanted The Boy and the Heron to be something that it’s not. When it suddenly switched to full-blown Fantasy, I wasn’t ready to relinquish that sombre, studied tone that so mesmerised me to begin with. And when the parakeets turned up, I felt like I’d fallen asleep and woken up during some kind of ill-conceived accompanying featurette.

It would be reductive for me to say that The Boy and the Heron simply wasn’t for me. Even though it confused me for long stretches, I have thought about the film pretty consistently since I watched it two evenings ago. It feels like a film very much made with the intention of inspiring deep thought and repeat viewings, and I will almost definitely go back to it in future, perhaps with more successful results now I am prepared for the whiplash-inducing narrative and tonal shifts. Is there a masterpiece hiding somewhere amongst this collection of arresting images and intriguing ideas? It makes me happy to know that at least some people have found one. I might need to wait for a future cut that completely jettisons the parakeets!

16. Porco Rosso

Porco Rosso is perhaps Hayao Miyazaki’s least-discussed film, despite being a huge hit in Japan on its initial release. This peculiar wartime Adventure/Comedy got somewhat dwarfed in popularity by the Fantasy double that followed, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, which finally brought international fame to Studio Ghibli. While it’s a shame in some ways that Porco Rosso remains a comparative obscurity in the Ghibli canon, it’s not all that surprising. Aside from having a rather bizarre premise that injects the smallest smattering of Fantasy into an Action-Adventure format, Porco Rosso feels a bit messy in its plotting and execution. This may have been due to the fact that it was the first film Miyazaki made without a screenplay and storyboards firmly in place before production began. Instead, he started in on key animation and worked on the rest as he went along. This approach became a key part of subsequent films which may also account for how unwieldy plots for films like Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away can feel. This loose plotting was not always to the films’ detriment but in the case of Porco Rosso, there’s a sense that it doesn’t know where it is going for most of the runtime. A dogfight finale which seems thematically appropriate suddenly collapses into a weird comic boxing match that feels anticlimactic. Perhaps the fact that Porco Rosso was originally commissioned as a 45 minute in-flight movie for Japan Airlines and ballooned from there is also a factor in its comparative sloppiness.

Fortunately, the scrappy, breezy style of Porco Rosso is appropriate for the material. It fits with the manner of the laconic part-porcine protagonist, a pilot who has inexplicably taken on the appearance of a pig. With its slightly Noirish air, Porco Rosso is able to examine its themes of wartime misogyny so credibly that many mistake its approach for sexism itself. The film could have avoided this with a bit more of a considered approach. As it is, Porco Rosso can’t seem to countenance its own silliness and a potentially wonderful Noir homage keeps slipping into more of a parody. There are also problems with the characters. While Porco himself is a rather marvellous creation, the film’s villains are all a bit half-hearted and irritating, from the buffoonish pirates to the narcissistic American pilot Curtis, who seems to want to marry every female he encounters. Without a strong element of conflict, Porco Rosso ends up feeling like a load of boys pissing around in planes, with the airborne scenes surprisingly falling well short of expectations. The female characters, meanwhile, are underwritten, with the seventeen year old Fio being used to make points about misogyny without really having enough of a personality to make an impression of her own. Her skills as a mechanic continually confound the men but she seems to be there solely for them to react to. Gina, the club owner in love with Porco, also seems defined by her relationship to the male lead.

I really want to love Porco Rosso more than I do. The potential for a thrilling adventure is enormous but the story that is delivered is small and inconsequential. It is a lot of fun to watch but for a film made by an aviation enthusiast it has surprising difficulty getting off the ground.

15. Howl’s Moving Castle

Howl’s Moving Castle is Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of the 1986 novel of the same name by British author Diana Wynne Jones. With Wynne Jones’s blessing, Miyazaki made a very different version of her story, emphasising the war (a mere tangent in the novel) in order to incorporate his own opposition to America’s invasion of Iraq. Laudable though his intentions are, Miyazaki’s use of Wynne Jones’s characters to make his own political statement results in a confused and incident-heavy script that spends far too little time on character and motivation and ends up slowly transforming into an amorphous puddle. This flaw has its own visual metaphor in the shapeshifting Howl himself who, in one of the film’s most striking scenes, dissolves into a goopy globule due to a fit of despairing pique. There are numerous visual delights throughout Howl’s Moving Castle but in his enthusiasm to deliver them, Miyazaki often runs ahead too quickly. For instance, the young protagonist Sophie is transformed at an early stage into an elderly woman and sets off on a quest to break the spell. But so little groundwork has been laid for her character that we only really start to know her when she is in her geriatric guise, robbing her predicament of the necessary stakes required to make us care.

Before I get too absorbed by the problems I had with Howl’s Moving Castle, I should say that I do like the film a fair bit. Miyazaki’s storytelling had become more unfocused since he switched to a technique of storyboarding his films as he went along which, coupled with his rapidly ballooning narratives in epics like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, could lead to some headscratching storylines. The upside, however, is the palpable freedom with which this approach imbues this most visually ambitious and imaginative of filmmakers. Howl’s Moving Castle shares in this invigorating looseness and feels refreshingly breezy as a result, its company proving very easy to be in. As he had with Spirited Away, Miyazaki fills the screen with wonderful creations. His interpretations of Wynne Jones’s characters are delightful, with the fire demon Calcifer and the mute, frozen-featured Turnip Head proving especially memorable. Despite the oversight in the early stages of characterisation, the elderly version of Sophie is a droll protagonist, while Howl himself is an alluringly enigmatic creation. Unfortunately, Howl’s mysterious nature confounds even Miyazaki himself, who seems somewhat baffled by how to adequately depict such a volatile character. Once again, Howl becomes a metaphor for the film itself in the way he vacillates wildly with inadequate elaboration.

I’ve never read the novel but Howl’s Moving Castle the film feels caught between two stools, the product of two not-quite-compatible creative minds. Miyazaki lacks the confidence he displays when working with material of his own invention, which allowed him to shepherd the seemingly disparate elements of Spirited Away into an impressively sturdy whole without ever giving the impression that he’d broken a sweat. Howl’s Moving Castle, on the other hand, feels helmed by a director sweating like the Witch of the Waste attempting to climb a large flight of stairs (a scene which has since not-unreasonably been called out as fatphobic). Howl’s Moving Castle also features another unconvincing romance, a regular occurrence in previous Ghibli films including the aforementioned Spirited Away, and as that thread begins to take prominence there’s an overwhelming sense that Miyazaki has let go of the reins. 

In common with Princess Mononoke, I enjoyed the first hour of Howl’s Moving Castle significantly more than the rest of it. But while Mononoke’s lore-heavy Action approach simply wasn’t my cup of tea, Howl’s Moving Castle’s whimsical Fantasy aesthetic is at least something I can continue to enjoy when the plot goes kaput. As it loses its way in the second half, I can hunker down in the never less than ravishing visuals and see out the runtime in the company of another beautiful Joe Hisaishi score. But in terms of full emotional engagement, I’m afraid the speed at which this moving castle insists on moving prevents it from being very… well, moving!

14. When Marnie Was There

When Marnie Was There was the final Ghibli film before the studio went on a half-decade hiatus from full-length features. Many people felt that the humongous Miyazaki/Takahata double feature of the previous year would’ve been a more appropriate way to temporarily bow out and When Marnie Was There, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s second and final film for Ghibli, was perceived as a rather odd last-minute addition, like that weak Spider-Man film that dangles at the end of the MCU’s Phase 3. But When Marnie Was There also garnered itself quite a reputation as one of the best Ghibli films made by the younger up-and-coming staff. With no input from the big three Ghibli mainstays of Miyazaki, Takahata or producer Toshio Suzuki, this peculiar adaptation of a comparatively obscure British novel became a modest hit and the first Ghibli film not directed by the studio’s founders to bag itself an Oscar nomination. While its semi-fantasy approach to real-world issues makes When Marnie Was There recognisable as a Ghibli film, in other ways it feels quite different. The animation style, though beautiful, has a cold haunted feel that absolutely fits with the weighty themes of death, anxiety, depression and child abuse that all crop up here. Many also detected LGBTQIA+ themes in the way the relationship between the two central girls plays out, a notion that inspired mild controversy when the final twist throws this angle into an incestuous context so soon after From Up on Poppy Hill had delved into similar territory. As was the case with Poppy Hill, any incestuous implications in When Marnie Was There were not remotely as pronounced as the oddly salacious obsessives would have you believe, and in fact the climactic plot developments make the viewer question and decontextualise everything that has gone before. Only those unwilling to relinquish their immediate reading of the narrative to make room for new information really found themselves tied up in self-inflicted knots.

I’m torn on my feelings about When Marnie Was There. On the one hand, this is a very interesting and involving film that further broadens the Ghibli canon’s ambitious reach. I loved the examination of depression and anxiety, with the protagonist Anna being one of the most realistically depicted female leads in a Ghibli film and not idealised or softened in any way (in one fit of panic, she calls a girl who is taunting her a “fat pig”). The mysterious Marnie and the abandoned mansion in the marsh where her dreamlike spirit is found have the thrill of classic children’s ghost stories about them and the more muted palette with which Yonebayashi is working complements that atmosphere wonderfully, eschewing the primary blue skies and vivid green hills of Miyazaki’s world for something more restrained but no less gorgeous. On the other hand, the story of When Marnie Was There tries to explore too many interesting avenues to the detriment of pretty much all of them. I really wanted the film to lean into Anna’s anxiety, and the revelation of her status as a foster child affecting her self-esteem was so fascinating that I became frustrated at how lightly it was touched upon. In its final act, the film becomes heavily focused on Marnie’s tragic backstory and the alluring sense of mystery that the first two acts maintain comes at the expense of a massive information dump in the third act which feels like too much misery all in one go. Many people found When Marnie Was There deeply moving but when the details of Marnie losing both her husband and child cut across the unraveling of her abuse at the hands of her nanny, it just felt like too much heavy plot in one go. While I applaud Yonebayashi’s attempt to take on such weighty themes, they lost some impact in the overcrowded execution, a fatiguing experience that in turn robs the revelation of Anna’s parentage of its potential impact.

If When Marnie Was There slightly bodges its storytelling (and how much of that is down to the original novel I can’t be sure), it remains an interesting and entertaining viewing experience and one that I’d gladly indulge in again. If the emotional weight of the tragedy-packed story ultimately worked against it for me, Yonebayashi does establish and for the most part maintain an eerie and compelling air of paradoxically alluring discomfort that feels unique in the Ghibli filmography. 

13. Ponyo

On his journey to becoming one of the world’s most famous directors, Hayao Miyazaki’s films got bigger and more ambitious. While this gave us masterpieces like Spirited Away, there was also an element of crucial simplicity that got lost. In Miyazaki’s early work, from My Neighbour Totoro to Kiki’s Delivery Service and even to some extent Castle in the Sky, the narratives were a lot easier to grab onto and keep hold of. This is not to discourage the art of more challenging storytelling but in films like Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle I sometimes found myself mainly admiring the artwork because I had disengaged with the plot. Even Spirited Away, undoubtedly one of the great masterpieces of animation, had a degree of emotional disconnect. With Ponyo, there’s a palpable feeling of Miyazaki trying to get back to that simpler approach, a desire reflected in the bold, cartoonish appearance of Ponyo’s world. Though it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Totoro, Ponyo does reinstate that fantastically accessible atmosphere that feels targeted at children without excluding adults.

For a while there was a terrible phrase that went round in regards to Miyazaki: “the Japanese Disney.” Although I understand the attempt to parallel the impact Ghibli had in Japan with Walt Disney’s effect on western animation, generally the only thing that links Disney and Miyazaki is the medium in which they worked. But Ponyo, while still retaining its national identity, is the first Ghibli film where I do feel a slight Disney influence. The beautiful dialogue-free opening sequence of Fujimoto’s underwater outing with his daughters and Ponyo’s escape by jellyfish has a strong Fantasia vibe, while the later arrival of Ponyo’s mother introduces a character with the same ethereal presence as The Blue Fairy from Pinocchio. These similarities are likely quite inadvertent but they are indicative of Miyazaki’s more relaxed and conventional approach to storytelling here. Ponyo is still filled with invention but the story plays out coherently and with fewer tangents or unnecessary characters. Miyazaki’s recent work had sometimes felt like it was bursting at the seams with ideas, to the extent that Howl’s Moving Castle practically ate itself in the second half. Ponyo’s narrative rises and falls, with some dips occasionally lolling too long in an inactive state, but the whole thing follows a satisfying progression from A to B without taking detours round Q, X and £ just because it can.

While Ponyo’s comparatively smaller palette led some Miyazaki fans to feel underwhelmed, it’s refreshing to see him channel his relentless ambition into something a little lighter and there’s as much skill involved in crafting a more tightly focused narrative as there is in juggling a plethora of plot threads and characters. I love Ponyo’s storybook depiction of its idyllic but untamed coastal setting, its handful of mini-adventures supporting the themes of the overall narrative and the simple sweetness in the two central relationships: a budding friendship between five year old children and a mother-son bond. In depicting the discombobulating clash of two worlds, Miyazaki does a fantastic job of differentiating them. Sōsuke and Lisa’s everyday life has a straightforward realism while Ponyo’s undersea kingdom is an overtly magical creation. When Ponyo’s father Fujimoto first waddles up out of the ocean, the juxtaposition is striking. 

When the imbalance of nature caused by Ponyo’s arrival on dry land leads to a raging tempest, the film hits its dramatic high point . Rather than save this event for the finale, Miyazaki places it in the middle of the film. While some may argue that this results in Ponyo peaking too early, it actually gives the film a lovely rising and falling tempo that mirrors that of the waves themselves. Many viewers have found the focus on love a bit perplexing given the young age of the protagonists, although I think that’s more down to issues of translation and there are enough thematic clues in the run-up to the film’s climactic test of Sōsuke’s love for Ponyo to make clear that this is a platonic and innocent love and that the film is really interested in Sōsuke’s acceptance of Ponyo in whatever form she takes, be it fish, girl or that weird chicken-limbed midway point that she keeps turning into.

Some people absolutely adore Ponyo, while for me this is a very solid mid-tier Ghibli. Considering the company in which that places it, that still makes Ponyo a must-see and it was a relief and a delight to find Miyazaki stepping back from the brink of the Fantasy maelstrom on which he was teetering to embrace something so sweetly simple once more.