Every Studio Ghibli Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

For a good number of Studio Ghibli fans, Princess Mononoke is easily within the top three films released by the studio: it is an epic blend of fantastical, adult and humanist elements (of course) with a rampant imagination that is not afraid to go to darkness. It's also another of Miyazaki's environmental fables, concerned with showing the consequences of human destruction in a similar way to Pom Poko, though with more moral shades of grey.

And as a delightful epilogue, Harvey Weinstein was apparently dissuaded from cutting the film (something he loves to do, notoriously) when he was sent a Katana through the post with a note reading simply "no cuts". That's one way to do it.

This was the film that really strengthened Studio Ghibli's international profile: buoyed by Weinstein's sudden lack of enthusiasm to cut, the film made a lot of money on the back of a record-breaking Japanese run, precisely because it deserved to. It is beautiful and entertaining and while there's an earnest message in there, it never seeks to preach or even fully scold, taking in ecology, feminism, and an anti-war position simultaneously. That the story isn't crushed under that weight is remarkable.

This is grand scale Ghibli story-telling in its finest form, transformative, drenched in imagination and disarmingly beautiful, and it deserves to be cherished.