My favorites were probably "Grave of the Fireflies" (warning: it's heavy and devastating), "Pom Poko" (very funny), "From Up on Poppy Hill", "Arrietty" to name a few. The fantasy-centered films are good, but my personal taste tends to lean towards the slice-of-life/coming-of-age films so that's why those were some of my favorites.
The only truly "bad" movie of the bunch is their latest from 2020: "Earwig and the Witch". It's computer generated instead of hand-drawn but it looks like a computer generated film from the early '90s. Just ugly and uninspired. And the story was not good. It had promise but did absolutely nothing with it. Very disappointing film. Thankfully, it looks like their next release (summer 2023) will be back to the hand-drawn style.
Earwig and the Witch was a really fun movie to watch back when the Gamestop short squeeze was in the news. It's a film about overcoming cruelty and injustice through a hacker mindset, rather than resolving conflict through cathartic resistance. Goro in an interview said:
> "Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki and Yoshiyuki Tomino, are, in a manner of speaking, the first generation of those who experienced the war, who saw a radical change in values. Their opposition to authority and violence began from a certain kind of resistance, and they came together to make something, to start building something new. I think it's a kind of revolutionary mindset. But it's not possible for those of us who were born amid the period of economic development to possess that. The answer I've come to now, which made me think while making movies, is found in Earwig."
> "There's dubious stuff going on across the world, and there's no rosy future waiting after an upheaval. And this state of affairs will probably continue," Goro says. "If people rose up democratically against violence, would stable peace eventuate? It's a very difficult situation. I get the feeling that an ending with catharsis isn't something you should portray without careful consideration. At the same time, we need some kind of fantasy to live mentally enriched. We realized the time has come to decide on where to put emphasis."
fwiw, Earwig and the Witch, while produced by Studio Ghibli, was not a Hayao Miyazaki film (it was directed by his son) and was critically panned. Definitely one to skip.
And the elder Miyazaki walked out during the premier of his son's first feature film in an apparent expression of disgust at his son's creation. Not exactly a model father.
Old Hayao was not a good father, even more so for Western standards. He dragged his son into his work, and then effectively threw him under the bus when it became clear he was not going to be particularly good at it. From the outside, it looks like a classic case of a capostipite, the upstart who builds a family fortune and is then disgusted at the fact that his son is of a different breed.
Looking at it from the elder Miyazaki's perspective: Seeing that disaster of a film and realizing that your name was going to be associated with it forever after you spent your entire working life establishing a very high standard was probably a very difficult thing to endure.
I rather think it’s the opposite. It was a decent film, but all the others are masterpieces. It sucks for Goro because it’s basically impossible to live up to the standard unless you’re a once a century genius.
The grim tone of Grave of the Fireflies and the equally bright and cheerful tone of Totoro made more sense to me when I found out that they were a double feature at the cinema.
Any you didn't like?