Curated playlist
Anime films with original screenplays
- Castle in the SkyCastle in the Sky opened in 103 Japanese theaters on the 2nd of August 1986, carrying on its shoulders the future of a brand-new animation studio that had been in existence for barely a year. The film was the first production to bear the…
- My Neighbor TotoroMy Neighbor Totoro, a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, opens on a family driving to an old house in the countryside, their belongings stacked in a truck. Two girls - Satsuki, around ten years old,…
- Spirited AwaySpirited Away opens on a ten-year-old girl named Chihiro Ogino riding in her parents' imported Audi, sulking about moving to a new neighborhood. Her father takes a wrong turn down an unexpected road, parks in front of a tunnel, and insists…
- Princess MononokePrincess Mononoke arrived in Japanese cinemas on the 12th of July, 1997, and within days the newspapers had a name for what was happening: the "Mononoke phenomenon." By the end of its first week, more than a million people had seen it. By…
- Pom PokoPom Poko, a 1994 animated film from Studio Ghibli, opens not with heroes or villains but with raccoon dogs fighting each other over scraps of shrinking forest. The film was written and directed by Isao Takahata and released in Japan on the…
- PonyoPonyo begins with a goldfish-like creature trapped inside a glass jar, drifting toward shore on the back of a jellyfish. That creature is Brunhilde, daughter of a misanthropic underwater wizard named Fujimoto, and the story of how she…
- The Boy and the HeronThe Boy and the Heron, a 2023 fantasy film from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, reached Japanese theaters behind a single poster and nothing else. No trailer. No cast list. No plot summary. A decade earlier, Miyazaki had stood at a press…
- The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the SunThe Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun arrived in Japanese cinemas in 1968, carrying ambitions that no anime film had openly declared before it. A young boy pulls a rusty sword from the shoulder of a stone giant, and by the time…
- Your NameYour Name began, in a sense, on the ruined streets of a fishing village called Yuriage. Its director, Makoto Shinkai, visited the town in July 2011, months after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami had struck it. Looking at the wreckage, he…
- Momotaro: Sacred SailorsMomotaro: Sacred Sailors screened for the first time on the 12th of April 1945. Director Mitsuyo Seo made it by order of the Japanese Naval Ministry. It was the first feature-length animated film Japan had ever produced, running 74…