Hirokazu Koreeda’s 2008 film follows the Yokoyama family over one day as they gather to mark the twelfth anniversary of their eldest son’s death. Built on restrained performances, unhurried pacing and naturalistic detail, it traces the quiet tensions between duty and desire, memory and erasure, love and resentment — all without raising its voice or breaking its rhythm.
Howl's Moving Castle adapts Diana Wynne Jones's novel about a young milliner cursed into old age by a witch, who ends up living in a wizard's walking castle as a war between two kingdoms escalates around them. Hayao Miyazaki directed the film for Studio Ghibli after an earlier director departed, and it took $236 million against a $24 million budget, becoming one of the most commercially successful Japanese films ever made and winning a Nebula Award for Best Script.
Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 film follows thirteen-year-old witch Kiki as she leaves home to complete a year of independent training in a coastal city, running a flying courier service with her cat Jiji. Miyazaki rewrote Eiko Kadono's more episodic novel to centre on the strain of independence itself, and the film became the first Studio Ghibli release to succeed commercially on first release.