When I was a child, I remember having my father rent this from the video store down the street for me just because it had a giant cat (the bus) on the cover. He took it home and I instantly fell in love with it. I rented it over and over until the Christmas of ’95 when it was given to me as a gift from my pop.

This is a film that I still love fifteen years later. The relationships between the sisters (especially at the end), the combination of nature and the human world, it’s just very beautiful.

Miyazaki’s films are never the greatest in straight story-telling, but are excellent in the way a children’s book works just by emotion and images alone, It’s the kind of beauty the seems to be lacking in most of the modern animated films of today.