OK, here are mine:
Also Rans:
1. The Wings of Honneamise – still reduces me to tears every time I watch it
4. Balloon (1991)
9. Ghost In The Shell – still stands up as a surprisingly profound meditation on how bound up personality and identity is with your physical body
18. 5 Centimetres Per Second
23. The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb
24. Animal Farm (1954) – I highly recommend the piece by Julian Upton in the recent book Offbeat about this CIA funded film, which really increased this work in my estimation. Even the imposed happy ending kind of works in the context of how the film was funded, exposing the somewhat scarily naïve politics to ensure everything goes back to the way it was and the bad guys are defeated!
34. Kirikou And The Sorceress
37. Paprika
38. My Neighbours The Yamadas
46. When The Wind Blows
Orphans:
2. Patlabor – The Mobile Police (aka Patlabor: The Movie) – a great detective story with an extremely exciting race against time ending that just happens to feature people piloting giant robots. Plus Mamoru Oshii’s dog (which appears in all his films, even his live action Polish-set one, Avalon) appears here to provide the critical clue to the mystery! This probably makes my list less for the action (though that final sequence on the collapsing sea-plaform is one of the best laid-out action sequences of the 80s) but for that excellent , almost wordless sequence of two private detectives investigating the city for clues behind the work of a scientist who recently committed suicide. That for me is one of the perfectly paced sequences in animation.
5. Roujin Z (Old Man Z) – still has that timely message about health service privatisation and using the patient as a commodity!
7. A Grand Day Out – Not as polished as the later Wallace & Gromit shorts, but all the more charming for that. Love the mice putting on the sunglasses to watch the rocket launch!
12. Macross: Do You Remember Love? - the first, and best, film on my list to show how a love song can win a war and save the universe!
13. A Close Shave – I can’t believe I’m the only person who voted for perhaps the best Wallace & Gromit short of them all! The bungee jump window cleaning! The motorcycle display team formation of sheep! The revelation of Gromit’s prison reading (Crime and Punishment by Fido Dogstoyevsky)!
14. I Married A Strange Person – I voted for this secure in the knowledge that Bill Plympton’s better know work The Tune would be getting some votes. Then The Tune didn’t seem to get any! Either way I Married A Strange Person is a great blend of 50s sci-fi, sex comedy and moments of total Looney Tunes anarchy
19. The Place Promised In Our Early Days – a fascinating alternate history film with its strangely political dimension of a divided Japan. Kind of the way I would imagine an animated Wong Kar-Wai film to turn out like.
21. My Dog Tulip – if you aren’t put off by long discussions about the sex lives of dogs and their dysfunctional anal glands then this is perhaps the best film about the joys of pet ownership/being owned by a pet. I’m by no means a dog person but I can easily transpose much of the material here to my cat, her habits, the annoyances of having to clean up after certain ‘events’, yet also the joy of seeing another animal seemingly happy to see you or stay by your side, and the wish to do the best for them in return.
26. Faust (1994)
29. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem – with the new Daft Punk album out, I simply had to vote for this animated film version of their Discovery album. It kind of outdoes Rock & Rule, but is not quite as good as Macross: Do You Remember Love? in the ‘love song that saves the universe’ stakes!
31. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade – a fantastic mix of alternate history, retro 50-60s stylings, political revolution, and a doomed love story across the police force/terrorist divide that takes the Red Riding Hood tale as its main metaphor
32. Steamboy – up there with Akira for its handling of action and its great sense of locations
33. Strings – this is an epic quest story told through puppetry, with the death of the characters involving the strings holding them being cut, and many philosophical conversations about who is up there manipulating them, and for what purpose. A beautiful take on mythological stories.
35. Macross Plus – I think the four part series is the best way to watch this film but the film is great as well. While not quite as good as The Wings of Honneamise, this does feature some of the best and most exhilarating airplane flight sequences in animation (albeit planes that can transform into giant gun-firing robots in mid-air! And I have to admit that I’ve not yet gotten to The Sky Crawlers yet), a very touching love triangle storyline that as it develops throws issues involving past memories of attemped assault into the mix to complicate matters, and the wonderful computer generated pop idol Sharon Apple whose inevitable breakdown into computerised insanity provides the impetus for the climax.
Plus this has an absolutely stellar score.
40. Fly Peek! Peek The Baby Whale – this is one of those strange cases, like Simba The White Lion/The Lion King where a more famous film comes along later that bears a striking similarity to a Japanese original. In this case Fly Peek! is a film made two years before Free Willy, featuring a young boy trying to free a captive whale. Yet this is far more touching and magical.
41. Battle Angel Alita – there have been frequent rumblings of this getting made into a big budget American film at some point (wasn’t there rumours about James Cameron doing it?), but this little film is good enough to stand on its own. Set in the future and featuring a society of haves (never seen and in a floating city anchored to the Earth via enormous cables) and have nots (who exist in the slums/enormous rubbish dumps on the ground below), a scientist scavenger finds a discarded robot, puts her back together and names her Alita. He also gives her a thorough grounding in fighting techniques which comes in handy in the frequent encounters she has defending herself from other scavengers who attack others for their ‘spare parts’ to sell on the black market.
Half of the film is this origin story but the other half involves the desperate attempts of a young man to escape the world below and reach the floating city above, with Alita (who has no memory of the floating city) concerned but tagging along. This is where the film gets even darker but stays full of fascinating ideas, as the boy turns out to be the notorious part scavenger that has been terrorising the area even more than usual in an attempt to make the money to buy his way onto the station. When even that isn’t enough he tries to climb the tethering wires, with the result of losing half of his body and only being saved by the scientist grafting him with mechanical parts. Having lost most of his humanity the boy is still so driven that he chooses to continue chasing his unobtainable dream even if that means certain death.
Bleak and in some ways nihilistic about the prospect of ever making your way in a stratified society (yet also in some ways showing that you can make a go of things in abandoned places if you try), it is also a very thoughtful science fiction film in its own way.
42. Grey Digital Target – staying on the subject matter of Battle Angel Alita, Grey Digital Target is about a world where people have to enlist in a never-ending war in order to win the credits needed to achieve much coveted Citizenship. Grey is the man who has survived many tours of duty at the beginning of the film, and the first half of the film shows him meet a whole new crew of cannon fodder only for them to be mercilessly killed. This happens a couple of times with only Grey left standing as the interchangeable supporting cast of characters arrives and gets immediately killed (this is one of the best films for creating that sense of trauma, fading into numbness, of always being the last one left) until eventually a bigger quest to reach a central tower and destroy it slowly comes into view. Grey takes his newest band of supporting players to attack it (along with a couple of stragglers they pick up along the way), but will they succeed and even if they do will it only be as a suicide mission?
The animation of Grey Digital Target is quite limited but it is the ideas in this one that make it stand out. Brutal and upsetting but an excellent piece of work.
43. Fear(s) of The Dark – This one kind of crept in as an overspill from the horror list project: a neat little black and white fully animated portmanteau film!
44. Princess (2006) – This is obviously inspired by the animated sequence from Kill Bill Vol 1, in the sense that it takes subject matter that could never be tackled in live action and animates it instead.
45. Memories
48. Alois Nebel
49. In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep
50. Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend – I had to throw this in there, although I’m kind of glad that I’m the only person who voted for it! It is just that, in an era where mainstream films seem kind of besotted with ‘THE APOCALYPSE’ whether in the form of the End of Days, zombies, natural disasters and so on, The Legend of the Overfiend, for all of its reprehensible demonic assault scenes and limited animation, is still unique in capturing the utter ‘destroy it all’ nihilistic urge in humanity. Nothing is pure and even the illusion of innocence, such as teenage love, is soon sullied.
In fact I might go as far to say that it is, albeit sublimated, only of the best ‘teenage experience’ films yet made, where everything seems desperately, life threateningly important! One where all of the adults are corrupt, rapacious and sometimes literally inhuman. Where coming of age sexually is kind of the end of your idyllic life and in a strange way the sign of your impending death (it is no coincidence that the final apocalypse causing the demonic world to overflow into ours is caused by the hero and heroine losing their virginity with the girl immediately becoming pregnant with ‘the saviour’ and whisked off to a secure temple, while the boy turns into the ultimate giant masculine hell beast and proceeds to destroy the city over the end credits!)