Although there is great variety in Japan’s animated output, western audiences are increasingly drawn to anime for qualities that repeatedly appear in the medium. Part of it is the sheer beauty of the animation. Although modern anime often uses computer generated imagery to enhance its visuals, most films maintain a traditional, 2D aesthetic that is painfully lacking in western animation. Howl’s Moving Castle, one of Miyazaki’s very best films, is a visual marvel. The eponymous mobile home is a whirring, clanking, hand-drawn beauty; a morass of moving parts that manages to be equal parts beautiful and ungainly. It marches around lush, mountainous landscapes and passes by immaculate European towns.
Sunao Katabuchi’s In This Corner of the World feels inspired by the films of Isao Takahata, Studio Ghibli’s other giant of the medium. The story, which follows young families during bombing raids in World War II, obviously draws comparisons to Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. However, the soft palette tones and the dramatic use of white space in the frame reflect his other works, such as Only Yesterday or The Tale of Princess Kaguya. Meanwhile, The Red Turtle, which was produced by Studio Ghibli but directed by the Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit, is one of the most visually sumptuous animations of recent years. Dropping any kind of dialogue from the film, de Wit relies wholly on his hand-drawn mise-en-scène to tell the story. Lush forests fill the frame with green, or wide-angled shots of the ocean shimmer with a tranquil but menacing blue.
Another reason crowds are increasingly drawn to anime is the compassion that characterises so many of the films in the medium. Many anime films that cross over to the UK focus on teenagers or young adults, yet they never look down on or patronise the characters and their feelings. Take the films of Mamoru Hosoda, who effortlessly melds coming-of-age stories with dizzying fantasy concepts. In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the lead character’s romantic life is of equal (or greater) importance to her than the fact that she time travels. Wolf Children tells a story of self-actualisation through the lens of werewolves, managing to make an initially alienating premise immensely moving and heartfelt. The Boy and the Beast, his latest and most ambitious work, makes this blend of real and fantastical even more clear, with a boy torn between finding a life for himself in our world and his second existence as a martial artist and friend of the Gods in an underground realm.