Director Steven Spielberg has returned to the animated film which he considers to be one of the best of all time. And surprise: he is not American!
Steven Spielberg has only made one animated film out of the nearly 40 feature films he has directed. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn allowed him to try his hand at mixing computer animation and performance capture, with a visual result that was quite stunning for its time.
Although he has hardly tried animation as a director, Steven Spielberg is the co-founder of Dreamworks, a company specializing in animation. He has very often innovated in this field by financing in particular Les Animaniacs and Minus et Cortex, but also feature films like Balto, the different adventures of Fievel, The little dinosaur and the valley of wonders or Shrek.
Building on those experiences as a producer, the Jurassic Park director shared which animated film he considers to be one of the best of all time (via comic book):
I particularly admire Miyazaki’s universe, his storytelling skills and his taste. His Spirited Away is one of the best animated movies ever made, arguably better than any Disney movie I’ve ever seen. He was a big influence.
Spirited Away tells the journey of a 10-year-old girl and her parents. The little family takes a break in an abandoned theme park. Surprisingly, a feast awaits them there. Chihiro is suspicious but not her parents who, once satiated, turn into pigs. The young girl then finds herself alone in a complex phantasmagorical universe.
Ghibli
Considered one of the masters of the genre in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki has produced several masterpieces, including The Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro or Ponyo on the Cliff, among many others.
Pixar’s creative chief at the time, John Lasseter, who also directed the first two Toy Story films and 1001 Paws himself oversaw the film’s English dub, convincing Disney to release the film in the United States. It will finally collect 10 million dollars there and internationally nearly 275 million during its first release.
Ghibli
Being a fine connoisseur of cinema as a whole, if Spielberg says that Hayao Miyazaki’s films are perhaps better than all the Disney feature films put together, maybe they are all worth catching up on!
And good news if you are subscribed to Netflix, most of Miyazaki’s films are there at the time of these lines.