10 Great Anime Films Of The 21st Century (That Aren't Studio Ghibli)

Having found himself vaulted to the top of the anime world when he was handed the keys to helm a Studio Ghibli film over a decade ago - becoming the then-youngest director in the company's history outside of its founders - Hiromasa Yonebayashi looked to have the world at his feet on the back of Arrietty, his adaptation of the seminal children's novel The Borrowers, in 2010.

It's to his credit then that he ultimately elected to forge his own career further away from the studio then, leaving in 2014 on the back of the acclaimed When Marnie Was There to set up Studio Ponoc with producer Yoshiaki Nishimura, where the pair got to work on what would become their first feature away from the Ghibli umbrella. Having found success twice with adaptations of English books, Yonebayashi returned to the well and picked up Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick - crafting what would become Mary and the Witch's Flower.

Electing to forgo transplanting the action from the United Kingdom to Japan, it comes with plenty of the expected Ghibli hallmarks - a gentle pastoral sense of wonder folded into a fantastical world beyond ground-level imagination - it proved that the director could cut it away from the house of Miyazaki, offering a fable of a small girl who attends a magic school in the sky and gets into all sorts of winning scrapes.