Feature · Reel 01
Japan’s traditional filmmaking style has been breaking the global movie world for decades — and some of the best films of recent times have come out of the anime landscape. Here is where to begin.
If you are not aware of the world of anime, then you are seriously missing out. This traditional Japanese filmmaking style has been breaking into the global movie world for quite a few decades now, and it can be wholeheartedly said that some of the best movies of recent times have come out of the anime landscape.
What follows is a starter shelf: the films that turn sceptics into devotees. They span adventure, romance, war and science fiction — proof that animation is not a genre but a medium, and in Japan it has been treated as one for half a century.
Animation is not a genre — it is a medium. Japan has treated it that way for fifty years.
The film most people meet first, and with good reason. Ten-year-old Chihiro wanders into a bathhouse for spirits and must work to free her parents from a curse. It became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. If you watch one anime film in your life, make it this one.
A boy in Tokyo and a girl in the countryside begin waking up in each other’s bodies, and what starts as a comedy becomes one of the most affecting love stories of the decade. Your Name broke box-office records around the world and made Makoto Shinkai a household name far beyond Japan.
Neo-Tokyo, 2019: a biker gang, a government experiment, and an explosion of psychic power that levels a city. Akira is the film that introduced the West to what animation could really do — its influence runs through everything from The Matrix to Stranger Things.
A cursed prince is caught between an iron-forging town and the ancient gods of the forest. Grand, violent and morally complicated, Princess Mononoke is Miyazaki’s epic — a film about nature and industry that refuses to hand you a villain.
Two siblings try to survive the final months of the Second World War in Kobe. Devastating and humane in equal measure, it is regularly named among the greatest war films ever made — animated or otherwise. Watch it once; you will never forget it.
A cyborg security agent hunts a hacker known as the Puppet Master — and along the way the film asks what, exactly, makes a mind a self. Its imagery and ideas echo through decades of science fiction that followed.
A former bully seeks out the deaf classmate he tormented in elementary school. Tender, painful and beautifully observed, A Silent Voice shows the quieter register anime does better than almost any live-action equivalent.
However you enter, you will not leave the anime landscape unmoved. These films are not curiosities from a niche tradition — they are, quite simply, some of the best cinema of the last forty years. Seriously: stop missing out.