"Trees and people used to be good friends" | My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Japanese animation turns 100 years old in 2017. The art form initially flourished in 1917, as animators including Oten Shimokawa and Seitarou Kitayama produced short comedic films that ran for only a few minutes each. While the vast majority of those early animated shorts are now lost – due variously to time, humidity, earthquakes and the American fire-bombing of Tokyo – Japan’s animation (or ‘anime’, to use the borrowed Japanese term) industry has continued to thrive ever since.

Numerous directors have been and gone over the decades, and the industry has expanded and contracted. If we were to highlight a single filmmaker as the best artist anime has produced over that time, it’s a fairly safe bet that the majority of fans, critics and observers will cite Hayao Miyazaki. Furthermore if we were to highlight the very best film Miyazaki had directed, I suspect the majority would cite his 1988 fantasy My Neighbor Totoro.