The best anime movies on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, one of the most groundbreaking and influential animated films of all time, opens with an iconic motorcycle chase through the neon streets of Neo-Tokyo, a beautiful cyberpunk Metropolis built on the ruins of old Tokyo. The rest of the city, as explained in the opening text, was wiped out in an apparent nuclear blast in 1988 that plunged the planet into another devastating World War. The main events of Akira take place decades later, just ahead of 2020, but the impact left by the war quietly hangs over everything that happens in the movie in a way that feels surprisingly relevant to what’s going on in our very real world these days. []

The Castle Of Cagliostro is the first feature film written and directed by Princess Mononoke creator Hayao Miyazaki, is one of a few films “the Walt Disney of Japan” based on another creator’s work. The characters come directly from the popular Lupin III manga and anime series conceived by pseudonymous artist Monkey Punch. By the time Miyazaki was offered a crack at the franchise, super-thief Lupin, his laconic partner Jigen, their competitor/collaborator Fujiko, and their obsessive pursuer Detective Zenigata were already icons in Japan, with a popular comic-book series, two TV series, and two theatrical films—one of them live-action—already in release. Miyazaki, who had written and directed a couple of the TV episodes, stayed true to Lupin’s history and frenetic modus operandi, but he made him a young romantic who doesn’t hesitate to drop everything to help a pretty girl in trouble. The girl in question is Clarisse, princess of the tiny duchy of Cagliostro, the U.N.’s smallest member state. Count Cagliostro, a scheming distant relative acting on a hoary old prophecy about “uniting the dark and light,” has imprisoned her and plans to marry her in an attempt to find secret treasure. Zenigata, the Count, and Lupin do battle in a series of slapdash, high-energy comic chases and face-offs that showcase Miyazaki’s obsessively detailed, gloriously colorful animation style. This caper film possesses Miyazaki’s usual good-hearted charm, but he injects a manically energetic humor that his more sedate children’s films never quite achieve. []

Few wartime dramas are as heartbreakingly intimate as Grave Of The Fireflies, Isao Takahata’s 1988 animated tale (based on Akiyuki Nosaka’s semi-autobiographical short story) about a brother and sister forced to fend for themselves after the death of their mother during a 1945 WWII bombing raid. One of the most assured and affecting films ever released by Japan’s Studio Ghibli, Takahata’s story opens with tragedy (and mournful reunion) before flashing back to the Kobe, Japan home of teenage Seita and his younger sibling Setsuko, which is thrown into disarray when Allied forces rain flaming bombs upon the community. Emerging unharmed by this fiery attack, Seita discovers at a nearby hospital that his mother has been fatally injured. That, in turn, compels the kids to take up residence with their callous, selfish aunt, with the director maintaining a rigid focus on the emotional need, pain, desperation, and fear of his two young protagonists, left suddenly alone in a world that seems to be crumbling around them. []

Japanese comics artist Mamoru Oshii won a rare degree of praise in America for his chilly, labyrinthine cinematic experiment Ghost In The Shell, a movie that simultaneously explored the limits of 1995 animation technology and the limits of film’s ability to meaningfully adapt a lengthy, sophisticated book. Oshii protégé Hiroyuki Okiura hits many of the same chords in directing Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, a chilly, labyrinthine, Oshii-scripted meditation on humanity and brutality. The film takes place in an alternate-future Japan, where a Nazi occupation and withdrawal, followed by years of internal violence, left the country with an elite, fascistic police force and a terrorist resistance organization. The two groups frequently meet with explosive, bloody force, though apparently not quite bloody enough for some, as Constable Kazuki Fuse (animation voiceover veteran Michael Dobson) discovers when he fails to shoot a terrified young girl delivering a bomb for the terrorists. As his superiors come to doubt him, and plot to use him to uncover and eradicate The Wolf Brigade, a rumored renegade cabal within the Capital Police, Fuse seeks out and clings to the girl’s sister as if looking for an antidote to the violence in his life. It takes some effort to follow the film’s twisted story logic, which is heavily couched in visual metaphor stemming from the dark symbolism of an early version of Little Red Riding Hood. []