The most Miyazakian film by Makoto ‘the new Miyazaki’ Shinkai (Your Name., 2016) is slightly less romantic than usual, instead focussing more on learning to cope with death and solitude. We enter a gorgeous, multicultural underworld, to which our young female protagonist Asuna and her kawaii cat Mimi are irresistibly drawn.

Anthology project with three stories by Katsuhiro Ōtomo (Akira, 1988), who himself directs final short Cannon Fodder (about a world built around cannons), after Tensai Okamura’s comedic Stink Bomb (about someone unknowingly becoming a chemical weapon) and Kōji Morimoto’s highlight Magnetic Rose, combining space adventure with creepy psychological horror – and opera.

Successful coming-of-age story by anime giant Mamoru Hosoda follows nine-year-old runaway Ren and gruff beast Kumatetsu fighting, arguing, and slowly discovering the true meanings of strength, anger, and loneliness. After which, Ren will have to choose between romance in modern-day Tokyo and a beast kingdom rather resembling feudal Japan.

Groundhog Day meets video game. Each time the aliens kill Rita, her day starts over again. As if she wasn’t depressed enough already.

Wonderfully energetic adventure story marked the first collaboration between director Isao Takahata and his protégé Hayao Miyazaki – later founders of Studio Ghibli. With its mythological source material (an epic of the indigenous Ainu) and socialist message (well received by 1968’s students), Horus became known as the first ‘grown-up’ anime.

Even though narrator Yuki fears this might get laughed off as a mere fairy tale, director Mamoru Hosoda has given us a grounded and deeply empathetic film, drawn from his own childhood and mother, who raised him as a single parent.