Porco is definitely the best Ghibli but needs to be watched in Italian for max cred.

That's one that's directed by Miyazaki's son. It's not quite as polished.

Grave of the Fireflies is the main non-Miyazaki Ghibli film to watch

The few Anime films I have watched (it has been a long time and I can hardly remember them)

In no particular order:

1. Akira  -this started off looking spectacular but the image quality seemed to take a dive as it went on. Could be misremembering it of course. Enjoyed it.

2. Perfect Blue - odd little story with a twist ending. Enjoyable. Can't remember the visuals being particularly striking but they got the job done.

3. Fist of the North Star - - has jerk-o-vision animation but huge over-the-top fun and successfully portrayed a sense of desolation.

4. Metropolis - superb looking and I remember a steampunk-20s-jazz soundtrack - but can't remember the story. I think it was very loosely tied to the Lang film - at least with respect to the class system mapped onto the city levels.

5. Spirited Away - like Akira - I felt the visual wonder drop off as it progressed. It also overall dropped from feeling wonderous down to mainstream toward the end. Highly enjoyable though with a surfeit of ideas.

6. Grave of the Fireflies - effective and I responded to this emotionally.

7. Princess Mononoke - can remember how it started but can't remember the rest. I do remember enjoying it though.

Yeah - it's been a while....I enjoyed all of the titles btw.

In a move that should surprise absolutely no one, Danny Boyle has left the new James Bond film over "creative differences".

https://twitter.com/007/status/1031951674544476160?s=19

regmcfly wrote:

In a move that should surprise absolutely no one, Danny Boyle has left the new James Bond film over "creative differences".

https://twitter.com/007/status/1031951674544476160?s=19

He wanted to make it shit?

I just watched a bit of some Resident Evil film. Excruciating.

So you don't have to.

Some anime discussion in here, re non-ghibli good stuff, check out Patlabor 1 & 2 (what Mamoru Oshii did before he directed Ghost in the Shell)(which if you haven't seen it is worth a watch)



The Patlabors fall smack in the peak of the golden era for big budget anime, just as computers were coming in for stuff and hand animation was at the tippy top of it's game in the late 80's/early 90's

I also recommend what I believe is the final hand drawn movie from Production IG which is Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (which is a standalone movie from the whole Kerberos thing, which is a fictional timeline where Germany won WW2), you will also note watching this that the Hellghast were a shameless ripoff of the Kerberos troops. This movie is so well animated that people thought the human movements had been rotoscoped. Film came out in 1999 fuuuuuck I can't believe it's nearly 20 years old, etc. 

GooberTheHat wrote:

I watched My Neighbour Totoro with Isla yesterday. She loved it and watched it again today. She likes to jump and cling on to my chest during the spining top, tree bit, which makes it my favourite film ever. I'm contemplating spirited away but I think it might be too scary for her, she's only 3 1/2.

Yeah spirited away got a bit scary for my boy, similar age.

Spirited Away would certainly freak younger kids out when the parents transform. The bathhouse /stink/river spirit sequence might make for unsettlling viewing too - but it can be hard to predict what freaks a kid out.

Tempy wrote:

It’s cool, it just rankles when people talk about non-Ghibli stuff as having perfunctory animation.

Oh... I don't really know any of the names - only Studio Ghibli and Spirited Away I suppose. In my defence I wasn't really comparing Ghibli with non-Ghibli being ignorant of the scene.

This has made we want to watch Akira and Spirited Away again.  I'd like to give Perfect Blue another watch too after what you said.  I had a spat of watching this stuff - a long time ago - and then I stopped for some reason. Probably because my kids were pretty young then and I kept falling asleep trying to watch stuff at night. I like the inherent perceived weirdness of it all because of the symbolism so I'll get back into it at some point.

I can remember catching bits of Kiki's Delivery Service and Porco Rosso on TV - but not sure as to the quality of those cuts and dubs. I prefer to watch with subtitles. Watching with subs probably made me more likely to fall asleep back then as I find watching subbed films late at night soporific even now.

I can’t wait to introduce my nephew to Spirited Away, but at four and a half I still think he’s too young. I think six might be the right age. Things get ugly with No Face a bit later on, and that’s my main concern. It’s also a long film and right now he has a ten minute attention span.

Perhaps, but I can’t wait around forever! If doesn’t go over too well I can always abort.