Aside from the feature films, also don’t forget:

• his one major manga/graphic novel, Nausicaä

• Future Boy Conan (TV series)

• Panda Kopanda (aka Panda! Go, Panda!) (two short films)

• the five episodes of Sherlock Hound he directed

• On Your Mark (music video)

(of course, there’s more)

Deeper in the iceberg we find early animation work by Miyazaki on the 1969 film Phantom Flying Ship: https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/4d0af6c0638a415173b7de66766...

Future boy Conan is one of my absolute favourite tv shows and it feels so pertinent to our current time. I recommend it to others often, but no one takes a chance on it :(

I go back to watch FBC it every 5 years, it's absolutely fantastic in every way and for anyone.

Not Ghibli or Miyazaki at all but I would recommend Now And Then, Here And There as a companion piece. It's tropes and plot points are similar to FBC but seen through a very different lens.

Cool! I'll check that out!

Nausicaa the comic is incredible, beautiful, bigger story than the film, and has deeper worldbuilding. I second the recommendation.

Miyazaki has also two books with collected essays/articles of his; I have the first one and I would not strongly recommend them though they have wonderful sketch art inside. The essays are mostly old man rants about how everything is done worse these days and they weren't even written recently.

They are artistically sound and beautiful, but kind of boring to be honest. Kurosawa on the other hand satisfies all three.

Any recommendations from his work for someone who hadn't heard of him before?

Rashomon and Seven Samurai are classics. Kagemusha is probably my favorite.

"samurai" movies:

- Seven Samurai

- Rashomon

- Ran

- Throne of Blood

- Kagemusha

non-samurai:

- High and Low

- Ikiru

I would say that the essentials are Seven Samurai, High and Low, Rashomon.

Miyazaki’s films are boring? What?

They’re often light on plot and don’t foreground conflict. If you don’t enjoy drinking in a long animated “shot” (that’s another thing, they have relatively slow editing) with little movement or talking, don’t appreciate the attention to detail and highlighting of little everyday actions, or aren’t cool with simply absorbing a vibe, I can see how they might bore.

Well I don’t want to come off as a rube. I did appreciate the attention to detail and it’s a beautiful movie with a consistent vibe. You can still find something boring with all of those boxes checked though.

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that, but my wording kinda does, you’re right. I just meant that if those elements aren’t, at least in the particular mix and form they take in these films, engaging for a given viewer, I can see how they might be boring. They definitely have a different focus and form than most films, including a large majority of very-well-regarded or “sophisticated” films (I don’t mean they’re just different from, like, Fast and the Furious X).

Yeah, it took an effort to get through spirited away and nausica. I even tried a second watch through of spirited away but at the risk of being blasphemous, I found it boring.

I think it comes down to whether or not you enjoy slice of life. I just watched My Neighbor Totoro with my daughter. It was the first time for both of us. I found it amazing, but, ultimately, nothing actually happens in the movie. Spirited Away and some of the other movies are obviously more fantastical, but they still share a kind of mundane, day-to-day feel to their plots.

The only two animated films that have ever triggered an emotional response are Watership Down (when I was a kid) and Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies (when I was an adult). Both were really heavy in ways that are hard to articulate.

The trailer for the latter:

https://youtu.be/4vPeTSRd580?si=CAN__Md9KIKQcehN

Grave of Fireflies was to this day the only movie that made me cry.

It did so twice.

Best movie I never want to see again.

Pedant's note: GP's comment was how Guillermo del Toro compared Miyazaki to Mozart. Grave of the Fireflies was written and directed by Isao Takahata, not Hayao Miyazaki.

The Wind Rises makes me cry every time. It resonates with me in specific personal ways, however.

I think Sylvian Chomet is way closer to 'animation Mozart'. Miyazaki is very good, but overrated.