When Marnie Was There (2014)

Anna Sasaki is a disenchanted 12 year-old girl in Sapporo who has lived with foster parents ever since her own parents died. When she suffers a severe asthma attack at school, she is sent to the coast to spend time with her foster mother's relatives. Once in the town she becomes fascinated by a dilapidated mansion on the edge of a salt marsh. When the mansion turns out not to be as abandoned as she assumed, Anna forms a friendship with the secretive blonde-haired girl named Marnie who lives there. Finding out Marnie's secret has a profound effect on Anna's own life.

When Marnie Was There is a 2014 anime feature directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi for the noted production company Studio Ghibli. Following its release, and with the retirement of company mainstays Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, Ghibli has gone into a production hiatus. This makes When Marnie Was There the final studio production for the immediate future - and very possibly forever. That is a shame on two fronts: it's sad that such an exceptional company may be closing shop for good, and if so it's sad that it is closing out on what is a fairly underwhelming film.

Porco Rosso (1992)

Between the First and Second World Wars, the Adriatic Sea is packed with travellers, pirates and bounty hunters, all flying various seaplanes. The most famous of them all is Marco Pagot, a war veteran with the face of a pig, who is known across the sea as the legendary "Porco Rosso".

Porco Rosso is the sixth animated feature film by Japan's most popular and acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki. It is based on a three-part manga he wrote and illustrated some years earlier. In Japan it was by some distance the highest-grossing feature film of 1992.

In terms of Miyazaki's overall career Porco Rosso sits comfortably between the family-friendly adventure of Kiki's Delivery Service and the more mature fantasy of Princess Mononoke. Tonally it lies somewhere in the middle of the two: there is plenty of broad comedy for a younger audience, but there's also some more mature themes and character relationships as well. It is a nice combination, which makes this a particularly great film from this legendary filmmaker.

The Wind Rises (2013)

I have been putting off the day I would watch The Wind Rises, because it's purportedly the final feature film ever from the acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki. Once I watched it, there possibly wouldn't any any more to see. Actually going by the odds that's almost certainly untrue. He's claimed he was retiring from making films before, and accidentally made more films. In fact one estimate has him announcing his retirement on seven separate occasions in 1986 (after Laputa: Castle in the Sky) and again in 1992, 1997, 2001, 2004, 2008 and 2013. True to form he's currently directing a 10-minute CGI short to screen exclusively at the Studio Ghibli Museum near Tokyo, and my gut says if he likes the CGI medium there will be a feature to follow.

For now The Wind Rises is it. It feels like an unusual film. It retains the animation style, and the beautifully observed human movements and expressions. It boasts a superb orchestral score by regular composer Joe Hisaishi. It has a remarkable warmth and emotional resonance. Beyond that it stands pretty far apart from Miyazaki's other works. There's comparatively little whimsy to the piece, and no fantastical elements. Instead its a biographical drama based on the aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi: the inventor of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane.

The 14 best films of 2014

Unless you're a professional film critic, and can dedicate much of your working year to seeing every major and independent film release, compiling a 'year's best' list is a problematic task. Inevitably there are going to be critically acclaimed films that you miss, turning any amateur list into essentially a 'year's best... except for all of those other movies'. I missed quite a lot of films in 2014 that I expect could have made my list, including Whiplash, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Wind Rises and The Raid 2. I'll catch up with them all in due course, but for now they're out of contention for the list.

Take the list below not as some attempt at an authoritative 'best', but simply 14 films released in Australia for the first time in 2014 that I think are well worth your time in tracking down and watching.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013)

This past weekend I had my own little two-day Studio Ghibli film festival, first catching Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya on Saturday and then seeing the documentary The Kingdom of Dream and Madness on Sunday. The documentary, by Japanese filmmaker Mami Sunada, follows director Hayao Miyazaki around for a period of months as he works on his final feature animation The Wind Rises.

This is a beautifully constructed film. Rather than directly interview Miyazaki and his workmates, talking heads-style, Sunada purposefully allows the personalities and opinions to flow organically over the course of the film. We meet and observe Studio Ghibli's harried producer Toshio Suzuki, who is handling The Wind Rises while simultaneously trying to coax Takahata to finally complete Princess Kaguya so he can release it into cinemas. We meet former Ghibli employee turned successful Evangelion director Hideaki Anno as he's unexpectedly coaxed back into the fold to voice the lead character of The Wind Rises. And of course we meet Hayao Miyazaki himself, a smiling, wry, chain-smoking bundle of contradictions as he supervises work on the final feature film of his career.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013)

Studio Ghibli has been in the news quite a bit in the past week, with rumours - for now unfounded - that the company was going to close up shop altogether with the retirement of its co-founder and lead director Hayao Miyazaki. The news of Miyazaki's retirement gave a particular weight to his final film, the biographical anime The Wind Rises. Less high-profile has been the final film for his directing partner Isao Takahata, The Tale of Princess Kaguya. It was released in Japan last year and is now running the festival circuit internationally.

The film adapts the Japanese folk tale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. A woodcutter in the forest finds a tiny fairy princess inside a length of bamboo. He takes her home, where she transforms into a baby. The baby grows rapidly, and during her truncated childhood the woodcutter keeps finding gold and fine cloth inside the bamboo forest. He takes it as a sign, and with his newly found wealth takes the now-teenage girl to the capital to become a princess and find a proper suitor. The girl, Kaguya, would be happier if she stayed in the forest.

Probably not the end of Studio Ghibli

Signals have come out today, widely repeated by the international entertainment press, that Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli is to close its doors as a production house. It's recently released children's fantasy When Marnie Was There would act as the studio's final feature film. Subsequent reporting has already indicated that this is a false alarm: Ghibli might shut down production on future films. They're openly not certain where or how to proceed now that their founders are retiring.

Should a closure happen, it would be a sad day for animation, since over the past 29 years Ghibli has produced some of the world's most enchanting and accomplished animated features. The idea that a company with such a beautiful legacy of filmmaking would close up shop seems incomprehensible. On the other hand, its founder and chief director Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement at 73, as has Studio president Toshio Suzuki. The company has also consistently refused to outsource any of its animation process to smaller firms or to move offshore. This has created spiralling production costs that often are not being matched by box office. Miyazaki's own The Wind Rises earned US$134m from a budget of about US$30m. Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya, on the other hand, only earned US$23.5m from a budget of roughly US$49m. It's too early to judge the performance of this year's Ghibli feature, When Marmie Was There, but opening numbers were anemic to say the least.

Kiki's Delivery Service: 25 years on

There are few films in the world more delightful to watch than Studio Ghibli films, and there are few Studio Ghibli films as delightful as Kiki's Delivery Service. I've heard it said that the first Hayao Miyazaki film you see will always be your favourite, and while I'm not entirely sure I could pick a favourite these days I can't deny I will always have the warmest of affections for Kiki.

Today it turns 25, since it was on 29 July 1989 that it premiered in Japanese cinemas. It remains one of my favourite films, so it seems appropriate to wish it a happy birthday.

It was a critical production for Studio Ghibli, since its preceding double-bill of My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies had failed to turn a profit, and the high cost of producing animation meant that the studio would close shop if Kiki wasn't a hit. Thankfully it turned a healthy profit, grossing almost three times its ¥800 million yen budget by the time it left cinemas.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

Today Studio Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki are both synonymous with quality animated film. Miyazaki is regularly hailed as the greatest director of animation of all time, a claim that is surprisingly difficult to dispute. His films effortlessly blend character, tone, aesthetic and imagination, creating movie experiences that are unparalleled in world cinema. He is also unusually effective and creating and animating female protagonists, which is far too rare in the motion pictures of any country.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which was released in Japan in 1984, is his first original feature and a forerunner to Studio Ghibli, the animation company that Miyazaki set up with fellow director and producer Isao Takahata. It is visibly an early work: elements that would later feel standard for Ghibli films are only just being formed, and the visual aesthetic has not fully settled down to the signature Miyazaki “look” audiences will later grow to adore. The film is also a far more mature and adult work than his later family friendly films such as Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away.

A thousand years after an apocalyptic war devastated the Earth, the planet is dominated by an enormous poisonous jungle that is populated by giant insects and which is lethal to human life. In the nearby Valley of the Wind, a small kingdom lives out a peaceful existence – ever-watchful for the dangerous spores that may float from the jungle and infect their own forests and meadows. When an aircraft from the warlike Kingdom of Tolmekia crash-lands nearby, it results in a military invasion by Tolmekian forces – and leads the young Princess Nausicaä on a quest to finally learn the secrets of the poisonous jungle.

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

While Goro Miyazaki's difficult 2006 debut Tales from Earthsea may have led some to fear he did not share his father Hayao's talent for animated storytelling, his 2011 follow-up From Up on Poppy Hill should assuage most of those concerns. This grounded, sweet drama about a teenage girl in 1960s Yokohama is vastly superior, and sits quite comfortably among earlier Studio Ghibli productions such as Only Yesterday (1991) and Whisper of the Heart (1995). In many respects, it's the sort of film for which the word 'charming' could have been invented.

The film follows Umi Matsuzaki, a 16 year-old high schooler living in Yokohama. In her mother's absence she manages and cooks for the family boarding house in between her academic studies. Umi connects with the editor of the school's student newsletter,Shun Kazuma, and they grow closer while working to save the school's decrepit student clubhouse from demolition. Much more happens, that's probably a fair enough synopsis if you haven't seen the film yet.

The Cat Returns (2002)

The Cat Returns, like almost all Studio Ghibli animated productions, leaves you grinning from ear to ear. It fills you with warmth. It is one of these films that feels like a breath of fresh air, full of engaging characters, warm comedy and is an absolute delight from beginning to end. A shy, awkward high school student named Haru is walking home when she saves a cat from being hit by a truck. Much to her surprise, the cat stands on two legs, thanks her for saving it, and promises she will receive a reward. It isn’t long before Haru is being showered from all sides by catnip, boxes of live mice and – most unexpectedly of all – an expectation and demand that she marry the cat she rescued, actually the Crown Prince of a magical Cat Kingdom.

The Cat Returns is very obliquely spun out from an earlier Ghibli production, 1995’s Whisper of the Heart. Fans were clamouring to see more of that film’s internal fantasy sequences. A desire to accommodate those demands, coupled with an abortive plan to create a cat-oriented 20 minute short film for a Japanese theme park, led to the development of this film. Whisper of the Heart creator Aoi Hiragi had been commissioned to develop a manga based on the short, and when The Cat Returns mutated from a short into a feature it was Hiragi’s manga that was used as a starting point.