Top 100 Best Anime Movies of All Time

66. Patlabor: The Movie (1989)
Director: Mamoru Oshii

Mamoru Oshii’s work on the anime series Patlabor and its subsequent feature film are considered by many, including the director himself, as the turning point in his career. After leaving Studio Pierott and striking out on his own as a freelancer on a few projects, Oshii would join the independent creative collective Headgear and become a major influence in shaping the aesthetic of their first project, Mobile Police Patlabor. Although Patlabor: The Movie can be described as a pure pop entertainment film, it still manages to incorporate the elements of history, politics and religion that define Oshii’s signature as a director. With a solid mix of action, mystery, and not-so-subtle post-WII era commentary, the first Patlabor film is not only an essential installment in Oshii’s filmography but in the canon of anime history.

65. The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013)
Director: Isao Takahata

Isao Takahata’s final film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, also happens to be his first in over 14 years. When Takahata’s previous film, My Neighbors the Yamadas, was released in 1998, it was unofficially known by those who worked on it as “the film that broke Studio Ghibli.” Such an ignominious title was owed to Takahata’s choice to eschew traditional cel animation, the process by which all previous Ghibli films had been produced, and opt to animate the film entirely through computer, with each frame meticulously painted and animated through digital process. For Princess Kaguya, Takahata would again return to reiterate and arguably refine this technique, imbuing every frame and scene with the sort of scrupulous attention one would expect from a master calligrapher or Ukiyo-e artist. The film recounts the story of Japan’s oldest folklore story, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, wherein a young celestial maiden born from the root of a bamboo plant is adopted and later championed as a princess as she struggles to understand her identity as both a mortal and a child of the heavens. The movie’s grueling seven-year development and Takahata’s uncompromising commitment to perfection ultimately paid off, delivering a film of uncontested visual and thematic beauty.

64. The End of Evangelion (1997)
Director: Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki

The final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are notorious among fans of the series.Titled “Do you love me?” and “Take Care of Yourself,” the two-part finale infamously sidelined the climactic finale to the series’ central conflict, instead opting to take place entirely away from the action within the subconscious of the show’s protagonist Shinji Ikari as he wrestled to resolve the self-loathing and hatred which plagued him throughout the story’s duration. The unconventionality and unsatisfying nature of this conclusion prompted disgruntled fans to issue death threats on Anno’s life and Gainax’s building to be defaced with graffiti. In response, Anno set to work on an alternative ending to the series to be produced in two parts and aired in theaters. If you were looking for a spiritually affirming and uplifting conclusion, End of Evangelion is not that movie. Instead, what fans were treated to was perhaps one of the most nihilistic, avant-garde and devastating endings to an anime series ever conceived. In short, it is the best and worst of everything that is Evangelion combined to create a film that is unlike anything that had come before it. This much is certain, that despite its unrelenting darkness, End of Evangelion remains true to the ethos of its subtitle—that the joy of death is in the act of rebirth.

63. Spriggan (1998)
Director: Hirotsugu Kawasaki

During the tail end of the Cold War, a scientific expedition unearths a massive structure that turns out to be the mythical Noah’s Ark, which turns out to be less a biblical vessel of salvation and more a preternatural warship of mass destruction. As clandestine paramilitaries and a rogue U.S agency converge on the Ark’s location to harness its power in a bid for global supremacy, special ops “Spriggan” agent named Yu Ominae is dispatched to accompany the team sent to excavate the Ark site and prevent its apocalyptic reawakening at all costs. Despite being “supervised” and partially written by Katsuhiro Otomo and shamelessly trumpeted as the so-called “next Akira,” Spriggan had little hope of rising to the meteoric heights of expectation heaped by such a comparison. Instead, what it turns out to be is a super-powered Indiana Jones meets Armageddon spy flick packed with thrilling chase scenes, psychic martial art showdowns, and breathtakingly beautiful montages of the sparse picturesque plains and mountains of Nepal. For anyone who adheres to the “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” mentality in regard to late ’90s action anime, Spriggan is required viewing.

62. Macross Plus (1995)
Director: Shoji Kawamori, Shinichiro Watanabe

Originally created as a four episode OVA, then re-released as a cut-down, theatrical version with 20 minutes of new footage, Macross Plus is the first Macross sequel that takes place in the original timeline of the TV series. Creator Shoji Kawamori ret-conned Macross II and Do You Remember Love? as parallel world stories, setting the stage for Macross Plus as the first “true” sequel to the popular original. Macross Plus take place 30 years after the war between the humans and the alien Zentradis, detailed in the original show, and instead focuses on two rival test pilots (and former childhood friends) and their struggle to be the first to secure funding for a new, experimental fighter that would replace the current model. As with all things Macross, the two pilots are a part of a love triangle with a woman from their childhood, who is now the producer of Sharon Apple, the most famous singer in the galaxy (actually an Artificial Intelligence). Things start to go wrong when Sharon Apple achieves sentience and goes rogue, taking over the SDF-1 Macross ship and threatening thousands of lives. Macross II is an unconventional “sequel” in that it’s structured similarly to the original show—an overall threat, a love triangle, a famous pop idol—yet it remixes these elements in a strange but satisfying way. Macross II is perhaps best known for its heavy usage of CGI, a novelty at the time, and its fluid, realistic dog-fighting sequences, something Kawamori was obsessed with getting right. As an OVA converted into a theatrical, it’s not as beautiful as Do You Remember Love?, but the battle scenes in particular are incredibly detailed, and the mecha designs are (as always with the Macross series) top-notch. Macross Plus, like all things Macross, has a complex history in the United States. The theatrical version was never made available as a dub, and is now very hard to find—but the OVA is readily available, and almost as good. Buyers beware—like much ’80s/’90s anime, there is a pointless “almost rape” scene that serves no essential purpose, and story-wise, Macross Plus lacks the narrative push of the original’s “alien invasion” plotline. Still, for anyone looking to delve deeper into the Macross universe, Macross Plus still gives you exactly what Macross does so well—and this time, it’s official canon. —J.D.

61. Phoenix: 2772 (1980)
Director: Taku Sugiyama

Osamu Tezuka, creator of such seminal manga/anime as Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Black Jack, is often referred to as “the Walt Disney of Japan,” and for good reason. The impact of his work is almost incalculable, and unlike Walt Disney, Tezuka was an equally adept hand at both simplistic children’s fables and complex, philosophical works that dealt with the questions that lie at the very heart of humanity. Phoenix is a 12-volume manga series that falls into that latter category, and one Tezuka considered his life’s work. Phoenix: 2772, then, written and produced by Tezuka, loosely adapts characters and concepts from several volumes of the manga. The story is set in a distant future in which the earth is ruined and humanity is dying, its only hope a young man’s quest to find the Phoenix—a mythical creature whose blood is said to heal all, and grant immortality. The young man, Godo, sets off with his crew to capture and kill the Phoenix, but as with any quest for immortality, they are doomed before they even begin. A vision of mankind’s future as bleak as any seen in film history, Phoenix nevertheless ends on a psychedelic, cosmic note of beauty and hopefulness, making the two-hour journey of the film an ultimately worthwhile one. The character designs are firmly Tezuka-esque—one character is pretty much an exact clone of Tezuka’s Black Jack (no complaints here!), and the animation is shockingly fluid for the time. The background work is simple but clean. This is clearly feature film level animation with some musical sequences (particularly the dialogue-free first 12 minutes) and action scenes that rival anything in the Disney canon. This is a hard one to track down, as it’s mostly out of print in the United States, but if you can clap eyes on a copy, you won’t be disappointed. As an animated entrée into Tezuka’s greatest work, Phoenix: 2272,/i> is a perfect example of why his oeuvre was so much more than just Astro Boy. —J.D.

60. Blood: The Last Vampire (2000)
Director: Hiroyuki Kitakubo

The date is October 31, 1966. The military personnel stationed at the Yokota Air Base are scrambling for deployment on the eve of the Vietnam War while students at the base’s adjourning high school excitedly ready themselves for the campus’ annual halloween celebration. In the midst of this bottleneck of international tension and unsuspecting revelry, a mysterious transfer student named Saya has come to the school on a mission: to hunt down and kill a trio of terrifying creatures who prey on the blood and bodies of their human prey. Blood: The Last Vampire is significant for many reasons. The movie is not only the first anime film to be foremost produced entirely in English with Japanese subtitles, but also the first to eschew traditional cel drawn animation and be drawn and produced entirely through digital imaging software. Although already long ago pioneered by Disney on such works as Pocahontas and Mulan, this fact about the film’s production signifies a subtle yet seismic paradigm shift in the history of anime production and subsequently the culture of the medium at large. Blood was a proving ground of sorts for many of those involved, among them Kenji Kamiyama, a young screenwriter and background artist who would eventually go on to direct the television series adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell. Top that off with Katsuya Terada’s richly detailed character designs and beautifully photorealistic backgrounds, and you have an anime film packed with a surprising amount of aesthetic and historical significance considering its lean 48-minute running time.

59. Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan (1993)
Director: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

As the eighth and best theatrical release in possibly the best known anime franchise on the planet, Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan has probably been seen by more people than most of the other films on this list. Luckily, it’s well worth your time, whether you’re a fan of the ongoing series from which it sprung or not. The story, which, as with most other DBZ movies, is simply an excuse to gather the Z fighters together to combat a new threat to the universe. This time it concerns a super saiyan—a warrior from an alien race—who wants to enslave humanity, and whose quest begins with an orchestrated revenge against the heroes of DBZ. In other words, a typical shounen plot for perhaps the ultimate shounen show. What then separates Broly from the many other DBZ movies and specials? Two things: Broly himself is a silly but fun, over-the-top villain—a Super Saiyan version of The Hulk who only gets more powerful the angrier he gets—and the battle scene (comprising half of the film), which is endless fun for fans of kinetic action. Like any good theatrical film based upon an ongoing series, Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan contains everything that makes the series a hit, while offering the more fluid, cleaner animation that comes with a theatrical budget, and highlighting the best thing about the show itself—the pure, addictive thrill of great beings doing battle. As with all DBZ-derived material, Akira Toriyama’s simple story and pleasingly drawn characters remain a joy to watch for both kids and adults. If you are wondering about the massive appeal of the Dragon Ball franchise, Broly is as good a place as any to dip your toes into Toriyama’s best known work. —J.D.

58. Whisper of the Heart (1995)
Director: Yoshifumi Kondo

One of Studio Ghibli’s undersung treasures, Whisper of the Heart is a heartwarming coming-of-age story infused with fantastical imagery and endearing adolescent romance. Whisper of the Heart is the story of Shizuku, a stubborn and precocious bookworm who, after meeting Seiji Amasawa, an ambitious young violin-maker who shares her affinity for literature, is inspired to pursue her own passion for writing as an alternate means of accepting and professing her nascent affections for him. With spectacular aforementioned fantasy backdrops commissioned by artist Naohisa Inoue and the memorable inclusion of Olivia Newton-John’s rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Whisper of the Heart is a beautiful movie and a bittersweet farewell effort from Yoshifumi Kondo who, at age forty-seven, passed away from heart complications.

57. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (2010)
Director: Tatsuya Ishihara, Yasuhiro Takemoto

Attempting to describe the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise to a newcomer, let alone an outright anime neophyte, is anything but simple. A twenty-eight episode anime adapted from a series of light novels by Nagaru Tanigawa, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is ostensibly a science fantasy slice-of-life comedy centered on the supernatural misadventures of a group of Japanese high schoolers lead by the series’ pugnacious, foul-mouthed namesake. The series is a prime example of postmodernism, with self-referentiality, existential crises, and a non-linear continuity that has captivated and infuriated fans since it first aired. Running at two hours and forty-two minutes, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is the second longest anime film ever produced, and the series’ capstone. The film follows Kyon, the series’ true protagonist/audience surrogate, who awakes one day to a world in which nobody remembers either him or Haruhi Suzumiya, the latter whom, as you might have gleaned from the film’s title, has inexplicably disappeared. A darker, more introspective human drama that wrestles with the “many worlds theory” as readily as it subverts expectations, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is a remarkable film and an impressive finale for one of the most conceptually ambitious, genre-defying, and critically divisive anime series of the last decade. That being said, you’ll save yourself of whole lot of confusion by approaching this film only after you’ve watched the entire series. Trust me on this.

56. Night on The Galactic Railroad (1985)
Director: Gisaburo Sugii

Anime owes a great debt to the legacy of Kenji Miyazawa. One of the most prolific Japanese children’s fiction authors of the 20th century, Miyazawa’s work is transcendent, and Night on the Galactic Railroad is without a doubt his opus. The story follows Giovanni and Campanella, two young boys from a hillside town who are swept up on a mysterious dreamlike voyage across the boundless reaches of time and space aboard the titular railroad. A deft fusion of Christian symbolism and Buddhism, the novella is akin to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince or Edward A. Abbott’s Flatland in how it’s able to elicit spiritual and emotional profundities from a deceptively simplistic premise. Gisaburo Sugii’s adaptation is a treasure of Japanese animation, a film that can aesthetically captivate a child while provoking philosophical and religious contemplation on the part of an adult. With the exception of portraying the main characters as anthropomorphic cats instead of human children, Sugii’s film is a exhaustive tribute to Miyazawa’s legacy, going so far as to incorporate the auxiliary language Esperanto (one of the author’s many passions) throughout the film’s signage and intertitles. If you’re looking for a children’s film with a more cerebral take on faith and religion, go check out Night on the Galactic Railroad.

55. Battle Angel (1993)
Director: Hiroshi Fukutomi

Based off of the first two volumes of Yukito Kishiro’s long-running sci-fi manga series, Battle Angel (or Gunnm, as it’s known in Japan) is the story of Gally, an amnesiac cyborg who wakes up to a dystopian future after being rescued by a kindly prosthetic scientist and later embarks on a personal journey of self-discovery and adventure. Despite the series’ popularity and the manga having run for a cumulative nineteen years, Battle Angel adapts only the first two volumes of the series. The film is premium cyberpunk material, with sprawling cityscapes, homicidal cyborg junkies, brooding bounty-hunters, and an enormous megacity hanging above the mainland separating the haves from the have-nots. Battle Angel does a wonderful job of fleshing out Gally’s initial arc from an unassuming youth to a formidable bounty hunter and martial artist. The film’s impressive quality only makes absence of any subsequent adaptation all that more peculiar. Battle Angel just barely scratches the surface of its source material, but if you’re looking for vintage cyberpunk story and a concise introduction to Kishiro’s opus, you’d be remiss not to give this one a shot.

54. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki

The nature of Miyazaki’s oeuvre is such that it brims with an embarrassment of riches, each film in its own part situated indelibly into the continuum that is the anime canon. His films garner so much acclaim for their visual storytelling and emotional virtuosity that even those few that could be considered his “worst” movies still rank leagues above those animators who only aspire to his status. Case in point: Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. Miyazaki’s take on Kazuhiko Kato’s notorious master criminal is at once a rip-roaring heist film with heart and what might arguably be Miyazaki’s lesser films. Chalk it up to Miyazaki’s nascent efforts as a director, Castle of Cagliostro suffers from a plodding middle-half and a disappointingly simplistic antagonist while still somehow managing to sparkle with his signature charm peeking through the baggage of a preexisting work. Fans of the series passionately criticized the film for relieving Lupin of his anarchic predilections and instead casting him in the mold of a true gentleman thief, stealing only when his nebulous sense of honor permits it. In any case, The Castle of Cagliostro remains an important and essential artifact of Miyazaki’s proto-Ghibli work. A flawed Miyazaki film is a triumph all the same.

53. A Thousand and One Nights (1969)
Director: Eiichi Yamamoto

Created by Mushi Productions, the studio behind such classics such Astroboy, Kimba the White Lion and Dororo, and produced by none other than anime patriarch Osamu Tezuka, One Thousand and One Nights was the first installment in what would later come to be known as the Animerama series, a trilogy of thematically linked experimental erotic films created for adult audiences. Directed by Eiichi Yamamoto and written by Tezuka with the assistance of Kazuo Fukasaka and Hiroyuki Kumai, the film’s initial release in Japan was championed for its abstract animation, experimental live-action footage, adult storyline, and psychedelic rock music score. One Thousand and One Night would later be dubbed and receive an American release, predating the adult animated film phenomenon sparked by Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 Fritz the Cat, only to flop and receive a limited release. The English dub of One Thousand and One Nights is thought to be lost to the annals of history, with only the film’s original subtitled version to stand as a testament to one of the most bizarre and intriguing experiments in Japanese animation.

52. The Animatrix (2003)
Director: Various

The Animatrix is, without a doubt, the best thing to come out of the Matrix franchise since the original movie. At the height of the series’ popularity between production of the Matrix Reloadedand Revolutions, the Wachowskis recruited the talents of seven of the most preeminent directors working in the field of anime to co-create an anthology of nine short films set within and around the continuity of the Matrix universe. All the familiar tropes are present: the mirrorshades, the kung fu acrobatics, the pulsing rain of digital kanji. But the greatest quality of the Animatrix anthology was in refracting the singular vision of the Wachowskis to a kaleidoscope of yet-unexplored visual and conceptual possibilities within the series’ core concept. Whether it be Mahiro Maeda’s chilling prequel in “The Second Renaissance,” Shinichiro Watanabe’s low-tech noir mystery in “A Detective Story,” or Peter Chung’s bizarre and psychedelic journey into the mind of a human-designed matrix with “Matriculated,” the Animatrix dove directly into heart of films’ collective mythology and reimagined it with every last drop of untapped creativity the series had then yet to muster.

51. Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz (2000)
Director: Yasunao Aoki

Endless Waltz was originally produced as a three-part OVA wrapping up the story of the Gundam Wing TV series, which takes place outside the normal continuity of the Gundam “Universal Century” timeline. The movie cut is the superior viewing experience, however. Endless Waltztakes place one year after the events that wrapped up Gundam Wing, and involves the Gundam pilots, and their enemy Zechs Merquise, coming out of retirement to battle one last threat—and in some cases, each other. Where the Gundam Wing TV series had a plot that tended to meander, and sometimes used cheap animation or repeated cels, Endless Waltz is a feast for the eyes—filled with gorgeous, fluid battle scenes that any fan of giant robots will appreciate. Add to that the very smart decision to have the great Katoki Hajime (Short Peace, Gundam 0083) redesign the Gundams into their “evolved” forms, and this becomes much more than a simple end of series cash-in. For this film version, several shots from the OVA were retouched, and there are some mild adjustments to the original animation. As a payoff to the TV series, it’s a great way to visit with the Gundam pilots one last time, and as a stand alone, it works well enough that even if one is not familiar with the source material, it’s a fun ride. The usual questions about the cost of war, the price of peace, and human determinism that run through virtually all Gundam series are on full display here. If you want a concise example of what Gundam does so well relative to other types of giant robot anime, this is a dance worth taking. —J.D.

50. 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007)
Director: Makoto Shinkai

Makoto Shinkai’s fourth and arguably most well-known film, 5 Centimeters Per Second, focuses on the seemingly intractable distance, both physically and emotionally, between two childhood friends who pine for one another all the while the mounting circumstances of their lives intervene to pull them apart. Told across three short stories, the film follows Takaki Tono through childhood, adolescence, and eventually adulthood, documenting how his unrealized romance with his former best friend, Akari Shinohara, both spurs him forward and tragically leaves him incapable of pursuing human connection elsewhere. Set between the early ’90s and late aughts, 5 Centimeters Per Second ingenuously uses the absence and later ubiquity of modern communication technology to tell a story of mixed connections and emotional resonance. Filled with Shinkai’s requisite emotional motifs of loneliness, existential melancholy and romantic ennui, 5 Centimeters Per Second is perhaps the definitive introduction to Shinkai’s oeuvre for aficionados and newcomers alike.

49. My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)
Director: Isao Takahata

Isao Takahata, for all his legendary status as a director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, is sometimes a hard director to pin down, stylistically. Case in point: the delightful, virtually plot-free, humane comedy My Neighbors the Yamadas, which looks and feels like nothing else in his oeuvre. Despite this, it somehow also feels like quintessential Takahata. Based on the comic strip manga, Nono-Chan, the film is a series of vignettes centered around the Yamadas, an average family living in metropolitan Japan. These vignettes cover everything from how Takashi and Matsuko (the parents at the center of many of the tales) met, to family arguments over who has control of the TV remote, to grandmother Shige’s advice and proverbs told to the family. Despite not having an overarching story, by the end of the film, each character and their interconnecting relationships are finely and realistically drawn, and it’s easy to find oneself in love with this family, and their silly, crabby humanity. Complex truths about aging, marriage, family, and childhood are expressed through these simple tales about particular family members and their trials, tribulations and daily foibles. Also of note is the striking visual style of the film, designed to look like a watercolor comic strip. Takahata was so firm in his desire to achieve this look that My Neighbors the Yamadas ended up becoming the first fully digital film from Studio Ghibli. Whether you find it slow-moving or delightfully sedate, the visuals will captivate. My Neighbors the Yamadas is a film only Ghibli would make, and only Takahata could shape into such a poignant ode to the humanity of everyday families. Essential Takahata, indeed. —J.D.

48. Cat Soup (2001)
Director: Tatsuo Sato

There’s a lot of ways to go about describing Cat Soup to someone who’s never seen it before. Hallucinatory. Macabre. Avant-garde. Adorable. The only thing you can’t call it is boring. Directed in 2001 by Tatsuo Sato and co-conceived by Sato and Masaaki Yuasa, Cat Soup is an award-winning dark comedy short film inspired by the work of cult manga artist Nekojiru. The film is a brilliant example of stream-of-consciousness animation, following the exploits of a young kitten named Nyatta who embarks on a bizarre journey to recover the soul of his sister Nyaako. Describing what happens in the film is insufficient in attempting to understand it as compared to simply watching it. Cat Soup is a disquieting head-trip, a pastel-colored fever dream, and above all else a supremely creative short film that’s as visually entertaining as it is conceptually unnerving.

47. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Howl’s Moving Castle was the Miyazaki film that almost didn’t happen. Conceived in 2001 amidst the height of Spirited Away’s success, Mamoru Hosoda was originally slated to direct the adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 novel before he and Ghibli had a falling out due to a conflict of creative visions. Miyazaki seized the reins and made the film his own, crafting the source material into a creative vessel through which he could forge his impassioned contempt for the then-ongoing U.S. invasion of Iraq into a parable about a fruitless magical proxy war between two nations in a steampunk fantasy setting. Howl’s is a whimsical if occasionally tepid adventure of a timid young woman who, after being cursed with the body of an old crone by a jealous witch, is rescued by a charismatic wizard who lives in a gigantic walking house. The film’s titular castle is one of Miyazaki’s finest creations, resembling a bow-legged fish armed with stumpy wings and turrets hobbling across the countryside and shuffling debris to and fro. To be sure, though its finale is a bit muted and the abrupt resolution of a love story in the movie’s denouement is a bit too neat and tidy, the film is a quintessential Miyazaki effort nonetheless that’s sure to please both newcomers and enthusiasts who might have somehow not seen it yet.

46. Dead Leaves (2004)
Director: Hiroyuki Imaishi

You may not recognize Hiroyuki Imaishi’s name from a first glance, but in his career as an animator and director over the past two decades, he has amassed a body of work that’s iconic among post-millennial animation. Most recognized for his work as an animator on shows like FLCL and Neon Genesis Evangelion before going on to direct such cult classic series as Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Kill La Kill, his directorial feature debut, Dead Leaves, is a pure encapsulation of all of Imaishi’s idiosyncrasies and quirks as a director. The film follows the hyper-violent misadventures of two amnesiac criminals sentenced to life imprisonment aboard a space penitentiary embedded in the remnants of the moon. The film’s art style resembles what one would picture from an hyper-stylized underground cult comic from the ’90s, albeit injected with an industrial-sized adrenaline shot of anarchism, profanity and phallic imagery. The sum total of Imaishi’s aesthetic legacy can be traced back to Dead Leaves, whether it be his affinity for drill imagery that would later take center stage in Gurren Lagann or the frenzied hyperactive gunfights that would pop up in his work on FLCL. Dead Leaves is unapologetically low on story and crammed wall to wall with style, but when this combination plays so well to the director’s strengths, excess is absolutely what you want out of a film like this.

45. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)
Director: Mamoru Oshii

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a sharp detour, both visually and conceptually, from the tone and tenor of Oshii’s 1995 classic. Set three years after the events of Ghost in the Shell and the disappearance of Major Motoko Kusanagi, Innocence follows Batou, the Major’s former partner and acting field commander of Public Security Section 9. While investigating a wave of murders perpetrated by an experimental line of sex gynoids, Batou and Section 9 uncover a deadly conspiracy linked to a rash of mysterious disappearances that extends to the highest echelons of the Japanese government. As Batou plunges into the depths of the criminal underground in his search for answers, he begins to question the extent of his own humanity as a prosthetic cyborg. Can someone ever truly recreate themselves? What does it mean to be happy? And will the Major ever truly return? Innocence is a noticeably different film than the original in regard to its tone and subject matter. Approaching it less as a sequel and more of epistemological investigation through the medium of anime, Oshii doubles down on the Christian esotericism and philosophical koan-esque questions that define the greater part of his work to create a film that, although visually impressive and conceptually complex, feels bogged down in its latter half by the weight of too much ambition. If you’re a Ghost in the Shell devotee, Innocence is definitely recommended: a dense excavation into a wellspring of ideas and questions that don’t often come to the forefront of contemporary cyberpunk stories. If you’re more of a casual viewer, stick with the somewhat more palatable (but no less profound) 1995 original.

44. Voices of a Distant Star (2002)
Director: Makoto Shinkai

Makoto Shinkai’s debut is a testament to his skill as a director, and a primer for every broad emotional and aesthetic through line that would go on to define his work. When middle-schooler Mikako Nagamine is recruited by the UN Space Army to serve as a mecha pilot to fight off an alien threat striking at human civilization from the fringes of the solar system, she leaves behind her friend Noboru Terao on Earth. Initially committed to being pen pals, the gulf of time between their responses grows longer and longer given the relative distance of Mikako’s ship traveling from Earth. Produced almost entirely by Shinkai himself with music composed and performed by long-time friend and collaborator Tenmo, Voices of a Distant Star hones in on the themes of time, space and distance, and how they impact the fragility of human relationships in a way that few other works can, securing Shinkai’s status as one of anime’s premier auteur directors.

43. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999)
Director: Hiroyuki Okiura

Written and storyboarded by Mamoru Oshii, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is Hiroyuki Okiura’s feature film debut and the third and final installment in Oshii’s Kerberos trilogy. Jin-Roh follows a member of an elite anti-terrorist police unit who, after failing to subdue a mysterious suicide bomber in the midst of a heated riot, is plagued by disquieting visions and doubt regarding the virtue of his service. The film is as thematically complicated as it is aesthetically breathtaking, with superbly realistic animation, deafening firefights and oppressive melancholic ambiance owed in part to Hajime Mizoguchi’s score. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is an audacious reimagining of Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” set in an authoritarian alternate history Japan where the lines between the wolf and the girl, the hero and the villain, become blurred to the point where the two are rendered tragically indistinguishable by their fallibility.

42. Galaxy Express 999 (1979)
Director: Rintaro

Leiji Matsumoto was, along with Go Nagai, one of the preeminent creators of manga and anime in Japan in the 1970s. He is best known for his Yamato series, but his ultimate artistic achievement is perhaps the shared universe represented by the Galaxy Express 999, Captain Harlock and Queen Emeraldas manga and anime series. Galaxy Express 999 started as a manga, then became a 113-episode anime, and culminated in a series of films, of which the self-titled is the first. Directed by the great Rintaro (Metropolis, X, Neo-Tokyo), and written by and adapted from Leiji Matsumoto’s manga, Galaxy Express 999 is quintessential Leiji. The story (inspired by the classic novel A Night on the Galactic Railroad) concerns a distant future where humans have developed the ability to download their consciousness into robot bodies, essentially achieving immortality—but also losing some measure of humanity. Only the richest humans can afford this procedure, and the poor are forced to live in squalor and die in backwater areas. Tetsuo Hoshino is a young boy whose mother was determined for them both to become immortal. Hearing of the legend of the galactic train, the Galaxy Express 999, whose passengers are guaranteed immortality, he meets Maetel, a mysterious woman who controls the train and offers to grant his wish if he keeps her company along the way. Exploring concepts like class struggle, immortality and what it really means to be human, Galaxy Express 999 is a heady piece of work. Leiji’s designs remain very idiosyncratic, his style being highly defined by this point, and though this film was made for a relatively small amount of money, the backgrounds and designs are uniformly beautiful. The animation itself is not really above the quality of the TV series upon which it was based, but that doesn’t really hurt the proceedings. As a way of summing up over a hundred episodes of story into one film, it’s a surprisingly lucid, affective piece of melancholy science fiction—Leiji’s specialty. It was a smash at the Japanese box office, leading to a somewhat confusing sequel, Adieu Galaxy Express 999, three years later. It was adapted for the U.S. market in 1980 by Roger Corman’s production company, and as was typical for the time, highly edited and changed for American consumption. Stick to the original with this one. A good place to start with Leiji Matsumoto, when you are ready to go beyond Yamato. —J.D.