The Best of Hayao Miyazaki Animation

Ranking Hayao Miyazaki's films is a fairly difficult task since he's been incredibly consistent at producing high-quality movies over his 24-year feature film career. None of his films are even remotely bad, but some of them are certainly less good than others.

We here at IGN Anime love top ten lists and we love Miyazaki-san, so it only makes sense that we make an attempt to combine the two, however challenging it might be.
10 - Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro

The first feature film of Miyazaki's career, Castle of Cagliostro puts the lecherous master thief Lupin III in a sticky situation where he mistakenly steals a load of counterfeit bills from a casino. Lupin, being the criminal genius he is, realizes that there's more money in the plates that printed the fake bills.

Lupin traces the money to the small country of Cagliostro, where he and his team of rouges battle ninjas (yes, ninjas), foil the plans of the local royalty and save a beautiful young lady in the quest to find the Cagliostro fortune. The movie has often been compared to a James Bond flick…if Bond happened to be a Japanese thief.

While this film was pretty entertaining and certainly captured the essence of Lupin, the animation techniques of the time just weren't good enough to convey Miyazaki's vision and the movie felt a little stilted in some places. Miyazaki was just getting started though.

9 - Porco Rosso

Porco Rosso is largely regarded as Miyazaki's oddest film, which is saying something considering Miyazaki makes a lot of odd films.

It's a story that takes place in the early 1930s and follows the adventures of a dashing Italian pilot and bounty hunter that has, for some reason, been afflicted by a curse that gave him a pig's head. Miyazaki is a big fan of old airplanes, and the film served as an avenue for him to focus on his hobby with plenty of aerial acrobatics and dogfights.

Porco Rosso was originally intended to be a short work to entertain Japanese businessmen during long flights, and even Miyazaki isn't quite sure why it became popular amongst younger fans.

8 - Whisper of the Heart

The inclusion of this film on this list is a bit controversial since Miyazaki didn't serve as director on this title. He was, however, credited as screenwriter, storyboarder, producer, and sequence director. So for all intents and purposes, this was his movie.

The story focuses on Shizuku Tsukishima, an insecure junior high school student who loves reading books about fairy tales. Shizuku leads a decent life, but she's a bit unhappy with her life in comparison to the stories she reads about in the books. By chance she meets Seiji, a student in her class and fellow bookworm. Over time, Shizuku falls in love with Seiji, and his dream of becoming a violin craftsman inspires her to pursue her own dream of becoming a fantasy novelist.

Over the course of the movie, Shizuku is working on a fantasy book that is based on the antics of a character she models after a strange cat figurine that she sees in the antique shop Sieji's grandfather runs. She names this character The Baron, and the fantasy scenes that depict what Shizuku writes in her book were so popular with fans that Studio Ghibli releaseda movie based on them, The Cat Returns. That movie, however, is not technically a Miyazaki film so it's not in this list.

Whisper of the Heart explores the imagination of an adolescent, and the tenderness and warmth of budding young love. It's one of Miyazaki's most poignant stories, and one of the most masterfully told. But it just wasn't quite as immersive or epic as his later works.

7 - Laputa: Castle in the Sky

One of the earlier stories in the "steampunk" subgenre of fantasy fiction, Laputa was Miyazaki's third feature film. This film really made people take notice of Miyazaki's skills as a storyteller.

In Laputa, an orphan named Sheeta inherits a mysterious crystal that links her to the legendary kingdom in the clouds that is called, oddly enough, Laputa. Sheeta meets a resourceful and brave young man named Pazu, and together they make their way to the ruins of Laputa. But there are evil forces in the world that want to use the ancient yet advanced technology of Laputa to rule the world, and only Sheeta and Pazu stand in their way.

6 - Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

Miyazaki's second feature filmtakes place one thousand years after a near-apocalyptic war forces the last vestiges of mankind to struggle to exist on the fringes of a vast, polluted forest inhabited by gigantic insects. Nausicaa, the princess of the Valley of the Wind, is one of the very few people left that truly understands the environmental significance of the forest.

Despite the horrible 1984 U.S. adaptation of the film known as Warriors of the Wind, Nausicaa's great animation and epic themes still made it a cult favorite amongst anime fans in the 80s. The 2005 DVD release of the film featured an impressive list of big-name actors including Edward James Almos, Patrick Stewart, and Uma Thurman.

Nausicaa is a great film, but when compared to Miyazaki's later works it's quite easy to see that he was still just beginning to develop the unique themes and storytelling methods that would later become his signature style.

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