By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
t3mporary_126 on 03 June 2015
Edit Thread
SvennoJ said:

It's a shame Ghibli seems to be done. I actually quite liked From up on Poppy hill, not a bad second movie from his son. He's making that anime series now, I hope its good.

My favorite is Princess Mononoke (duh) followed by Spirited away, Ponyo, Totoro and Howl's moving castle.
I've only watched The tale of princess Kaguya once so far, it didn't really grab me. It might grow on me like Whisper of the heart and Nausicaa did which didn't have that initial impact as well.

Spirited away is finally coming out on blu-ray June 16th, together with the castle of Cagliostro (Miyazaki's first movie and still a lot of fun) and The cat returns. That will complete my Ghibli blu-ray collection, replacing all the dvds. Well until When Marnie was there comes out.

There's still Mamoru Hosoda from the excellent Wolf children, The boy and the beast should be coming out soon.
Mokoto Shinkai made the very Ghibli like Journey to Agartha (aka Children who chase lost voices), hopefully he'll make another feature length movie in the future. His shorter ones are good too.
Patema inverted was a nice surprise, I'll keep a lookout for Yasuhiro Yoshiura's next movie as well.

It saddens me I won't feel that sense of wonder anymore as watching Mononoke and spirited away gave me the first time. At least not from Ghibli.
There's always this to listen to to remember the good times.

Oh sweet, thanks for recommending other great anime features/films! I'll make sure to watch them in the future. I'm going to bookmark yours and RenCutypoison's posts to build a backlog of must see anime films now

And I can understand why people didn't like Kaguya at first. I watched Doug Walker from channelawesome.com review the movie and his complaints about it made sense. I agree with what he thought were the strong points of the movie: the beginning and the ending part of the movie. The middle part of the movie didn't seem as exciting as the other two but I found it essential for the movie's plot and for Kaguya's character. 

But the ending of Kaguya is definitely why I picked it as my third favorite Ghibli movie. I think it did a good job of emphasing the main points of the movie which I believe were free will versus destiny and the appreciation of life. And that flying scene with this music below was fantastic!

However, there are still quite a lot of Ghibli films I've missed, so my top three Ghibli films may likely change. But Mononoke and Spirited Away may always be my top two. Mononoke was the second catalyst that got me into watching Ghibli films again. Spirited Away was the first when I was very young, but then Pixar (before Cars 2) happened and I couldn't figure out who made Spirited Away back then

Edit: I think another theme in Kaguya could have been self fulfulling prophecy or the negative effects of a parent's expectation of their children. But those are kind of a related to Free will vs Destiny as well.