Joe Hisaishi!

Love Ghibli films.

My favorite Ghibli scores by Hisaishi are Howl's Moving Castle (wonderful main theme posted by tarheel in his first post), Nausicaä, Laputa Castle in the Sky and Princess Monnooke - in that order.

I have to agree with Rubang as well. Hisaishi's scores for Kitano's movies are great as well - especially Hana-Bi (best Kitano movie & best Hisaishi score for a Kitano movie).

OT: Both are great composers, but I think Kondo is more talented overall. More diversity and originality in his works.

Hisaishi tends to repeat/steal from himself too often IMO. That's not unusal at all among soundtrack composers (I call it the John Barry disease), but in Hisaishi's case it can get annoying, as his simple (yet beautiful) tunes tend to ressemble each other.

tough choices.. I'll take the wasy way out and pick Koichi Sugiyama! :)

I love the music from Nausicaa, but the youtube video of the performance is almost ten minutes long, and I was afraid people would be intimidated by that.  I am ashamed to say I've not seen any of Kitano's work, but now I've got something to check out.  My two favorite Japanese filmmakers are definitely Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai.  Five Centimeters Per Second was absolutely gorgeous.

Curse you! Now I'm listening to all the songs....again....

Regarding Kitano I just want to point out that it's not anime but moton picture. If you like comedy you should really check out "Kikujiro no natsu" (Kikujiro's summer) it's really funny. I also recommend "Hana-bi" (Fireworks) this is a very dark movie yet everything about it is beautiful got its share of violence though. "Sonatine" and "Brother" are both great movies and are set in Yakuza gang war so you'll see lot's of violence, blood, gunfight action if you like the genre, but Brother has more humour to it. I really liked "Dolls" too but you might want to avoid it since it's a very poetic and introspecitve movie with not much dialogue. It's made of several characters each with their own distinct love story and fate. Zatoichi is a samurai story with lots of sword action, comedy and its share of weird moments.

I'm not familiar enough with Hisaishi's music to truly compare the two, but I agree with what ph4nt says about Kondo in this quote.

Ha, I'm perfectly capable of appreciating more sophisticated content (and by sophisticated, I simply mean that it goes farther than skin deep).  Those all look good.  Hopefully, I'll get around to seeing some of them before college starts in the fall.