Spirited Away

#28 at the time of writing.

I'm overjoyed to see this film so high on the rankings - and deservedly so. It's a beautifully drawn coming-of-age story told in metaphor, peopled with a cast of spirits and monsters that is so delightfully other. It explores themes of alienation, fitting in, finding yourself, right and wrong, greed... and it carries you like its underwater train without you ever being sure of where you're going to end up next. It is so very strange, and yet resonates on a profoundly deep level.

Director Hayao Miyazaki is a master; this and My Neighbour Totoro are my favourite Ghibli films - they benefit, I think, from their relative narrative simplicity, whereas for me Howl's Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke despite also being high in the Top 250 are too complex and therefore don't hang together as well. (They are also darker in tone, which might be another reason I like them less.)

Incredibly, this film was apparently made without a script - the plot and characters developed organically via the storyboards.

Well, Miyazaki may finally have retired now (after five decades in the industry), but I still have plenty of unwatched Ghibli films to enjoy.

Princess Mononoke

#99 at time of writing.

After enjoying Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbour Totoro, and especially Spirited Away, I was excited to watch the highly IMDb-rated Princess Mononoke.

A demonically possessed hog attacks the town of a forest tribe and infects a young prince. The prince, doomed to suffer a drawn-out and painful death, travels to a faraway land to seek the help of a forest spirit. But the matriarch of the local mining town is in conflict with the forest spirit and its animal denizens, including the eponymous wolf-princess Mononoke, and our hero's fate becomes entwined.

This is a much darker and bloodier affair than the other Studio Ghibli films I've seen, and in my opinion not quite as satisfying. The characters were fun, but I found it hard to empathise with them. I enjoyed the story, but certainly less compelling than it could have been. I watched the English dub (as written by Neil Gaiman) - I wonder if anything was lost in the translation.

The animation is lush and beautiful - the last major animated motion picture to be filmed on plastic animation cels - and the film was phenomenally successful in Japan, the highest-grossing film since E.T. until Titanic came along.

One of the things that most charms me about Studio Ghibli films is the visualisation of Japanese animism. The cute clockwork forest sprites were a highlight.

Highest rated films on Amazon

Today I asked myself, "I wonder what are the highest rated films on Amazon?"

Amazon sells more films than any other organisation ever, and collects more reviews. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people rate each film 1 to 5 stars. So which are the most consistently highly rated films of all time?

The answer is surprising.

In the UK, most of the top spots are taken by TV series box sets, with Firefly and Band of Brothers being the highest rated. I've discounted TV series and picked out the top ten films.

On Amazon.co.uk... (current IMDb rating in brackets)

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Extended Edition Box Set) (8.8, 8.7, 8.9)
2. Tangled (7.8) (!)
3. Spirited Away (8.6)
4. Downfall (8.3)
5. Threads (8.0)
6. Monsters, Inc. (8.0)
7. The Gruffalo (7.3)
8. Labyrinth (7.3)
9. My Neighbour Totoro (8.2)
10. Goodnight, Mister Tom (7.9)

In the USA, they love their HBO dramatisations!

On Amazon.com... (current IMDb rating in brackets)

1. Temple Grandin (TV film) (8.3)
2. Mean Girls (6.9)
3. Ben-Hur (8.2)
4. Something the Lord Made (TV film) (8.1)
5. The Road to Independence (straight to video) (9.0)
6. The Shawshank Redemption (9.2)
7. Taking Chance (TV film) (7.3)
8. Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead (documentary film) (7.7)
9. A Christmas Carol (1984) (TV film) (7.7)
10. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (7.8)

Bizarre. Clearly the Amazon-rating audience are very different from the IMDb-rating audience.