Not Only Miyazaki: Where To Start Watching Anime

10 full-length films for those who haven't taken Japanese animation seriously before.

The main thing to remember about anime: it is not a genre, not a form, or a set of aesthetic features; it is national animation in all its diversity. What do “Tale of Fairy Tales”, “Cat Leopold”, “Glass Harmonica” and “Polygon” have in common? Country of origin only. It's the same with anime, where a wide variety of genres, visual techniques, and formats meet. If you shy away from Japanese animation because of your prejudice (this is for kids, this is for girls, it's boring, etc.), here's your chance (even ten!) To see something new and really outstanding both visually, and in terms of storytelling.

Akira (1988)

"Akira"
"Akira"
A two-hour film adaptation of a multivolume manga about the collusion of corporations with the military and the birth of an unknown new world on the ruins of pre-Olympic Tokyo in 2019 (at least half of the prediction came true) is often recorded in cyberpunk samples.

But this cyclopean film project with an overblown budget, unprecedentedly detailed animation for Japanese production in the 1980s, incredible attention to chiaroscuro and color, as well as the comics underlying the film, inherits not so much from the novels of William Gibson and Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, as a corpus of journalism, literature and especially comics-gekiga , reflecting the changes in Japanese society in the 1960s. Katsuhiro Otomo transferred to the future student protest, teenage motorcycle gangs ("bosozoku") and street carnage of pacifists with the police, and the "golden pencils" of the leading Tokyo kissanime studios (almost all of the then animation industry of Japan worked on the creation of "Akira" in one way or another) turned this stifling social commentary into a memorable sight, which for some time became synonymous with anime in general in the West.

Porco Rosso (1992)

Porco Rosso
Porco Rosso
Hayao Miyazaki 's romantic fantasy about the Adriatic in the late 1920s - the world of seaplane pilots, aerial pirates and swindling in the good sense of the word (the protagonist's replica that it is better to be a pig than a fascist became winged) - was specially commissioned by Japan Airlines for display on board airliners. Within the originally agreed 45 minutes, the director could not turn around. The film, which had grown up to one and a half hours, reached a normal film distribution and revealed the Miyazaki as he is known and loved today. Never tired of reminding the viewer of his (viewer's) childhood and youthful dreams; exploring the boundaries of the human (later will be "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away"); preoccupied with aviation as an adventure and at the same time a field of collective labor (this line will then be cast in "The Wind Rises" with its parallels between the design bureau and the anime studio).

Werewolves (1999)

Werewolves
Werewolves
A noir thriller about the fateful romance of an anti-terrorist unit employee and the sister of a deceased terrorist is sometimes mistakenly attributed to the director of Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii . But in this case, Oshii acted as a screenwriter, vacating the director's chair for debutant Hiroyuki Okiura ( "A Letter for Momo" ). The story is conceived as a version of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, told from the point of view of a wolf. However, which of the main characters - a special forces soldier or a girl - is this very wolf, this is a debatable question.

Okiura has constructed a bleak document of riots in an alternate 1950s Japan that echoes the Man in the High Castle world. As in the novel by Philip Dick, Germany won the Second World War in Werewolves. A visually flawless rogue film with a thick atmosphere of anxiety rare in animated films. Kim Ji-un's brand new game remake of Inran: The Wolf Brigade generally repeats the plot of the netizenbuzz, transferring the action to the united Korea of ​​2029.

Millennium Actress (2001)

"Millennium Actress"
"Millennium Actress"
Documentary filmmakers record an interview with an elderly actress for the anniversary of the studio, completely immersing themselves in her story. Real events mix with the plots of the films, the personal drama of the film star turns out to be inseparable from the post-war history of Japanese cinema, the interviewers themselves become characters in a whirlwind of episodes on the editing table of an invisible demiurge.

A typical example of the directorial style of Satoshi Kon (1963-2010), built on the beloved by this author and even more virtuoso than in his True Sadness (1998), playing on the border of dream and reality (there is even a version that Kon 's last film Paprika " Inspired Christopher Nolan to shoot" Inception "). An equally important point: "Actress" is a film about cinema made with great love and attention, a kind of anime response to "American Night" by Francois Truffaut and "Film, Film, Film" by Fyodor Khitruk .

"Cat Soup" (2001)

"Cat soup"
"Cat soup"
The chronicle of the surreal journey of the not quite living cat Nyatta and his partially dead sister Nyakko, based on the manga by the artist Nekojiru, who committed suicide three years before the release of the film adaptation (the comic book was still drawn by another author). Directed by Tatsuo Sato , exactly in line with the original, upturns the super-cute kawaii aesthetic into surreal macabre: Marvel at Hello Kitty in Black Lodge. The rarest example of pure art house in anime, winning Best Short Film at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal (2001).

Useless fact: a fragment of "Soup" appears on the TV screen in the film version of "Depicting the Victim" by Kirill Serebrennikov .

A Game of Mind (2004)

"A game of mind"
"A game of mind"
The directorial debut of Masaaki Yuasa (the foremost visualizer and most avant-garde commercial director of modern anime), A Game of Mind shows what Studio 4 ° C ( Memories of the Future , Reinforced Concrete , First Squad ) was capable of at its peak. development, when the ambitions of talented filmmakers coincided with the willingness of investors to support bold experiments. Here, the hapless manga artist Nishi stupidly dies from a yakuza bullet in front of his beloved, but gets a second chance: he needs to avoid death, save the bride and prove his worth as a friend, groom and member of society.

In the 1990s, Hayao Miyazaki chided fellow animators for overly warping reality. It is scary to imagine what impression Yuasa's painting would make on the master, where literally everything stretches, floats and curls with a Mobius ribbon: images and lines of behavior of characters, boundaries of the world, time and space.

For its achievements in the field of hand-drawn films "A Game of Mind" was awarded the name of the classic of Japanese animation Noburo Ofuji, was honored by Satoshi Kon, and indie animator Bill Plympton included this tape in the list of his five favorite films.

Summer Wars (2009)

Summer Wars
Summer Wars
A teenager with remarkable mathematical abilities is visiting the large family of a classmate from the provinces, while a malicious artificial intelligence takes over the global computer network. The world will have to be saved from a wooden house with a wired telephone line.

Russian rental slogan - "Don't say you broke the Internet!" - remarkably sums up just one facet of the Summer Wars. And this story has many facets. Director Mamoru Hosoda ( The Girl Who Leapt Through Time , The Wolf Children of Ame and Yuki ) has successfully reassembled traditional Japanese family movies (like the one that Yasujiro Ozu has shot all his life) into a large-scale animated blockbuster that is captivating and deep, gracefully balancing between history growing up, fiction, satire, warning movie and summer attraction. Until Hosoda was drawn, such an anime was filmed only by Hayao Miyazaki, who at one time, by the way, expelled Hosoda from his post as director of " Howl's Moving Castle" .

"Red Line" (2009)

"Red line"
"Red line"
One hundred minutes of ultra-dynamic animation with a dotted plot of interplanetary racing without rules, cleared of everything that is not directly related to dizzying races that ignore the laws of physics.

Production director Takeshi Koike (author of the hurricane fragment about the runner from the anthology "Animatrix" ) pored over the project for seven years. The result naturally blows up the brain of every viewer, who at least in general terms imagines how it is done and what labor costs traditional manual animation costs. And the animation of the "Red Line" is brought to a logical, technical and, it seems, even stylistic limit, pumped up with colossal energy. "Speed ​​Racer" crashes into "Sin City" at the second space speed, firing thermonuclear bombs from all the guns.

"The Tale of the Kaguya Princess" (2013)

"The Tale of the Princess Kaguya"
"The Tale of the Princess Kaguya"
An amazingly beautiful film adaptation of the Japanese folk tale "The Tale of Old Man Taketori" about the moon princess who is found by a childless elderly couple in a bamboo stalk. The swan song of Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata ( "The Grave of the Fireflies" , "Our Neighbors Yamada" ) is a friend, senior comrade and longtime associate of Hayao Miyazaki. Known for his almost Norstein perfectionism, Takahata weaved this pastel-watercolor lace about love, happiness, age and parting, breaking all planned deadlines and leading studio accountants to heart attacks. The final film is more of a high historical drama than a fairy tale.

"Your name" (2016)

"Your name"
"Your name"
Record box office receipts of this film in Asia ("Your Name" is among the highest-grossing Japanese films in history) is quite natural. Makoto Shinkai has produced a reference romantic movie that says a lot about the Japanese themselves and their neighbors.
For Shinkai, a nugget whose directorial career developed at some distance from the main paths of the Japanese animation industry, the story of body exchange, hackneyed by filmmakers around the world, becomes an excuse to construct an almost perfect, completely devoid of fake sentimental film for high school students. The love story of maturing teenagers Mitsuha and Taki evolves, flowing between genres ranging from sitcom to mystical drama. The filigree script of modern Japan makes this anime a document of its era.