le Blanc Michelle - Studio Ghibli: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata

A teenage witch, her hair ruffled by the wind, rides her mothers broom through the open skies. A giant robot unleashes molten destruction on the soldiers who have awakened him from centuries of slumber. A city worker recalls her childhood growing up in the 1960s. The skies above Kbe are filled with buzzing agents of death, raining down fire upon a terrified population. A burgeoning writer finds inspiration in a quaint antiques shop. A travelling warrior becomes infatuated with a feral wolf-child in a land scarred by war. A group of young people discover love and loss during their turbulent high-school years. A girls parents are turned into slobbering pigs. A father turns superhero, if only for a moment, when he stands up to a local biker gang. Two elated girls soar through the air inside a grinning cat bus, its headlight eyes tracing yellow streaks in the sky above the forest. Gods and monsters. Love and loss. Jubilation and despair. The horrors of war. Childhood wonder. Welcome to the heart-soaring, euphoric, whimsical, terrifying, compassionate and, above all else, emotional world of Studio Ghibli.

The remarkable films of Studio Ghibli show, without a shadow of a doubt, that cinema can be art. Often the terms art and cinema result in products that distance audiences, but Ghibli makes films that touch the soul, that can enrapture and delight everyone from toddlers to pensioners. Crucially, they retain the one thing thats frequently lacking in commercial cinema integrity. It is this, combined with an unprecedented box-office might in their native Japan, that has allowed the animators at Studio Ghibli to continue their work without compromising their artistic vision, telling the stories they want to tell, the way they want to tell them. Animation has often been dismissed, particularly in the West, as simplistic and aimed at children but, despite their appeal to children, Ghiblis films are universal. Put simply, Studio Ghibli is the finest animation company working today, a bold claim perhaps when comparing them with the mighty Pixar (huge Ghibli fans themselves), but one that holds.

Studio Ghibli was founded in 1985 when Miyazaki Hayao brought together Takahata Isao and producer Suzuki Toshio in order to make animated films the way they wanted to make them. Years of working for various companies producing film and television programmes had left the trio eager for artistic freedom, unhindered by external studio pressures. Now, outside Hollywood, Studio Ghibli is the most profitable animation company in the world. In Japan their films regularly break box-office records and run in cinemas for months on end. On the international stage they are highly regarded, having won numerous prestigious awards, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Spirited Away (2001), the only non-English-language film to have won in this category. Their box-office clout is indeed formidable, with no less than three of their features in the top-ten-grossing non-English-language films of all time. Their artistry is an inspiration to filmmakers the world over. Despite making films for their home market, they are among the most critically acclaimed studios in the world.