Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 debut for Studio Ghibli follows orphans Sheeta and Pazu as a government agent, the army and a band of air pirates all chase the crystal pendant that unlocks Laputa, a legendary castle adrift above the clouds. It underperformed on release but has since become a Ghibli staple, prized for its nineteenth-century-engineered flying machines and Joe Hisaishi's score.
Isao Takahata's 1988 adaptation of Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical story follows siblings Seita and Setsuko trying to survive the final months of the Pacific War after the firebombing of Kobe and their mother's death. Takahata's first film for Studio Ghibli, it opens by revealing Seita is already dead and builds the rest of its account around a specific, unheroic failure rather than a rescue.
A thousand years after industrial civilisation collapsed, Princess Nausicaä tries to keep her small valley out of a war between an empire determined to burn a toxic jungle and the giant insects that guard it. Miyazaki wrote and directed the film from his own still-unfinished manga, with only sixteen chapters of story to draw from and a production schedule of nine months on a budget under a million dollars, working with composer Joe Hisaishi for the first time and with the minor studio Topcraft rather than a major animation house.
Isao Takahata's 1991 film follows Taeko, twenty-seven, on a countryside holiday where memories of herself at age ten resurface alongside a present-day romance with a young farmer. Adapted from an episodic manga that covered only the childhood material, with the adult framing story invented by Takahata himself, it became the highest-grossing Japanese film of 1991 despite total absence of fantasy or spectacle.
Pom Poko follows a colony of shapeshifting tanuki in the hills outside Tokyo as they organize, and ultimately fail, to stop a suburban development project from destroying their forest home across three decades. Isao Takahata wrote and directed for Studio Ghibli, drawing on Japanese bake-danuki folklore and crediting several folklorists and illustrators for the tanuki's designs and lore. The film topped Japan's box office in 1994, taking in ¥4.47 billion, and won the Grand Prix at Annecy the following year.
A girl born from a bamboo stalk is raised by a poor cutter who, on discovering gold nearby, drags her into a nobility she never wanted. Isao Takahata's 2013 adaptation of a tenth-century Japanese tale uses loose, watercolour-like animation to match its heroine's resistance to being made presentable.