Japanese Animation

Japan took a medium the world had filed under children’s entertainment and built a national cinema out of it.

The pictures were drawn by hand, frame by frame, in studios run like workshops; Ghibli kept its animators on salary, which is part of why a Miyazaki crowd moves like weather. Akira arrived in 1988 on more than a hundred thousand painted cels, with a red-motorcycle slide that films are still copying shot for shot. That same year Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro played Japanese theatres as a double bill, the saddest and the gentlest films in the medium sold on one ticket. By the time Spirited Away had outgrossed Titanic inside Japan, the country’s biggest film ever was a hand-drawn picture about a girl cleaning a bathhouse for spirits.