Celebrate Studio Ghibli

Celebrate Studio Ghibli is on the horizon, and with so many certified masterpieces screening at once it'd be easy to get a little bewildered. Good thing Anthony Carew has the lowdown on navigating Ghibli's greats.

Celebrate Studio Ghibli

Forget Pixar. Screw Disney. Studio Ghibli is the greatest animation house that ever was. Founded in 1985, it's best known as the home to the legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who just this week announced he was officially coming out retirement to direct his 12th film, widely speculated to be a feature-length version of his new short Boro The Caterpillar. In timely fashion, the Celebrate Studio Ghibli season will be screening the entire Ghibli back-catalogue in cinemas across Australia and New Zealand. Here's a guide to Celebrate Studio Ghibli, for everyone from neophytes to knowing cineastes.

Beginners

If you're new to Ghibli, there's no better place to start than Miyazaki's unimpeachable classics. Celebrate Studio Ghibli understands this: the fest opening with 1988's My Neighbour Totoro, a shrine to childhood innocence and imagination, shot through with Miyazaki's sense of lyrical wonder and artful ineffability. It's magical, whimsical, cute, awe-inspiring, and deeply sad; a mixture of tones that is classic Ghibli. Totoro is Miyazaki's most beloved film, but it's not his best. That would be the 2001 classic Spirited Away, an endlessly rewatchable adventure in which a girl from Tokyo enters into a psychedelic underworld of witches, dragons, and assorted oddball spirits. Other entry-level Miyazaki staples include 2004's Howl's Moving Castle, a mystical, kinda-wacky anti-war rumpus based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones, and the utterly delightful Kiki's Delivery Service, a 1989 charmer that finds a teenage witch striking out on her own, and opening a broom-powered small business.

Intermediate

One of the most distinctive animated films ever produced, Isao Takahata's decade-in-the-making 2013 triumph The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya is a shrine to old-fashioned animation, a work of defiance in an age defined by digital. It's a film styled as sketch-work, with rough pencil lines and eraser marks left in, the frames hand-painted in blotchy, aqueous water-colour. Both narratively and visually, it's a plunge into fantastical escapism; an ancient folktale depicted with due reverence. Those looking to go deeper into Miyazaki's world can revel in his breakout 1984 film, Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind, a proto-environmentalist space saga, and 1997's Princess Mononoke, a sweeping epic whose titular heroine offers Ghibli's most vivid cosplay opportunities. There's also the more-obscure Ghibli B-movies Whisper Of The Heart (1995) and The Cat Returns (2002), a pair of related pics filled with the ache and glow of nostalgia's old wound, plus talking cats in top hats.

Advanced

For next-level Ghibli nerds, there's a pair of recent documentaries - 2013's The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness and 2014's Isao Takahata And His Tale Of The Princess Kaguya - which go behind the scenes of the studio. They're a pair of 'making-of' pics which show Miyazaki and Takahata, men in their 70s, still with their nose to the grind; wry figures at the centre of what, at times, play as workplace comedies. Miyazaki is shown working on his last film, 2013's The Wind Rises, which is one of the more 'grown-up' Ghibli jams, a fictionalised biography of Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer who designed fighter planes in the lead-up to WWII. The dark side of that conflict is shown in Takahata's incomparable 1988 classic Grave Of The Fireflies, a landmark in the animated medium. Animation had long been considered mere 'cartoons', but Grave Of The Fireflies is a brutal, tragic, unflinching portrait of siblings living in a bombed-out Kobe at the close of WWII. Three decades on, it's still a profound experience, forever one of Studio Ghibli's most impressive, acclaimed works.

ACMI presents Celebrate Studio Ghibli, 24 Aug - 24 Sep, at venues across the city.