For Fans of Hayao Miyazaki

Most people say start with My Neighbor Totoro because it is gentle. They are not wrong. But Spirited Away is where Miyazaki's entire worldview clicks into focus at once: the texture of labor, the strangeness of rules that make no sense until they do, the way a child can grow up over the course of a single night. If you can sit with its disorientation in the first act, you will understand every other film he made.

Porco Rosso gets passed over because it sounds slight: a cursed fighter pilot who is literally a pig, flying around the Mediterranean. The film is actually about the melancholy of men who survived a war they should not have, set against a Europe sleepwalking toward another one. Miyazaki himself has said it is his most autobiographical work. It is also the funniest thing he made, which somehow makes the sadness land harder.

Cartoon Saloon's Wolfwalkers arrived in 2020 and answered a question Ghibli fans had been quietly asking for years: is there anyone else? The answer is yes. It has the same insistence on hand-drawn line work over computer polish, the same sympathy for characters on both sides of an impossible conflict, and a female friendship at the center that earns every frame. Director Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart make films that believe, as Miyazaki does, that the natural world has a claim on us that civilization cannot fully cancel.