Not Only Miyazaki: Where To Start Watching Anime

 Werewolves (1999)

A noir thriller about the fateful romance of an anti-terrorist unit employee and the sister of a deceased terrorist is sometimes mistakenly attributed to Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii. But in this case, Oshii acted as a screenwriter, vacating the director's chair for debutant Hiroyuki Okiura ( "A Letter for Momo" ). The story is conceived as a version of the fairy tale about Little Red Riding Hood, told from the point of view of a wolf. However, which of the main characters - a special forces soldier or a girl - is this very wolf, this is a debatable question.

Okiura has constructed a bleak document of riots in an alternate 1950s Japan that echoes the Man in the High Castle world. As in the novel by Philip Dick, Germany won the Second World War in Werewolves. A visually flawless rogue film with a thick atmosphere of anxiety rare in animated films. Kim Jong-un's brand new game remake of Iran: The Wolf Brigade generally repeats the plot of the kiss anime, transferring the action to the united Korea of ​​2029.

Millennium Actress (2001)

Documentary filmmakers record an interview with an elderly actress for the anniversary of the film studio, completely immersing themselves in her story. Real events mix with the plots of the films, the personal drama of the film star turns out to be inseparable from the post-war history of Japanese cinema, the interviewers themselves become characters in a whirlwind of episodes on the editing table of an invisible demiurge.

A typical example of the directorial style of Satoshi Kon (1963-2010), built on the beloved by this author and even more virtuoso than in his True Sadness (1998), playing on the border of dream and reality (there is even a version that Kon's last film Paprika " Inspired Christopher Nolan to shoot" Inception "). An equally important point: "Actress" is a film about cinema made with great love and attention, a kind of anime response to  "American Night" by Francois Truffaut and  "Film, Film, Film" by Fyodor Khitruk.

"Cat Soup" (2001)

The chronicle of the surreal journey of the not quite living cat Nyatta and his partially dead sister Nyakko, based on the manga by the artist Nekojiru, who committed suicide three years before the release of the film adaptation (the comic book was still drawn by another author). Directed by Tatsuo Sato, exactly in line with the original, upturns the super-cute kawaii aesthetic into surreal macabre: Marvel at Hello Kitty in Black Lodge. The rarest example of the pure art house in anime, winning Best Short Film at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal (2001).

Useless fact: a fragment of "Soup" appears on the TV screen in the film version of "Depicting the Victim" by Kirill Serebrennikov.

A Game of Mind (2004)

The directorial debut of Masaaki Yuasa (the foremost visualizer and most avant-garde commercial director of modern anime), A Game of Mind shows what Studio 4 ° C ( Memories of the Future, Reinforced Concrete, First Squad ) was capable of at its peak. development, when the ambitions of talented filmmakers coincided with the willingness of investors to support bold experiments. Here, the hapless manga artist Nishi stupidly dies from a yakuza bullet in front of his beloved, but gets a second chance: he needs to avoid death, save the bride and prove his worth as a friend, groom and member of society.

In the 1990s, Hayao Miyazaki chided fellow animators for overly warping reality. It is scary to imagine what impression Yuasa's painting would make on the master, where literally everything stretches, floats, and curls with a Mobius ribbon: images and lines of behavior of characters, boundaries of the world, time and space.

For its achievements in the field of hand-drawn films "A Game of Mind" was awarded the name of the classic Japanese animation Noburo Ofuji, which was honored by Satoshi Kon, and indie animator Bill Plympton included this tape in the list of his five favorite films.

Summer Wars (2009)

A teenager with remarkable mathematical abilities is visiting the large family of a classmate from the provinces, while a malicious artificial intelligence takes over the global computer network. The world will have to be saved from a wooden house with a wired telephone line.

Russian rental slogan - "Don't say you broke the Internet!" - remarkably sums up just one facet of the Summer Wars. And this story has many facets. Director Mamoru Hosoda ( The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Wolf Children of Ame and Yuki ) has successfully reassembled traditional Japanese family movies (like the one that Yasujiro Ozu has shot all his life) into a large-scale animated blockbuster that is captivating and deep, gracefully balancing between history growing up, fiction, satire, warning movie, and summer attraction. Until Hosoda was drawn, such an anime was filmed only by Hayao Miyazaki, who at one time, by the way, expelled Hosoda from his post as director of " Howl's Moving Castle".

"Red Line" (2009)

One hundred minutes of super-dynamic animation with a dotted plot of interplanetary racing without rules, cleared of everything that is not directly related to dizzying races that ignore the laws of physics.

Production director Takeshi Koike (author of the hurricane fragment about the runner from the anthology "Animatrix" ) pored over the project for seven years. The result naturally blows up the brain of every viewer, who at least in general terms imagines how it is done and what labor costs traditional manual animation costs. And the animation of the "Red Line" is brought to a logical, technical and, it seems, even stylistic limit, pumped up with colossal energy. "Speed ​​Racer" crashes into  "Sin City" at the second cosmic speed, firing thermonuclear bombs from all the guns.