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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.
Any movie can be a time capsule, but the fantastical nature of animated movies makes them particularly ripe for nostalgia. Revisiting them can be a reminder that although we may grow up, we don’t have to grow out of certain comforts. Here are five recommendations from The Atlantic’s writers and editors for animated movies that have stuck with them long after the first watch.
Kiki’s Delivery Service (streaming on HBO Max)
My parents would reject the notion that they were tastemakers, but they often did an excellent job at identifying quality children’s cinema. Or perhaps they were just taken with the back-of-the-box description of Kiki’s Delivery Service, a VHS tape of which they brought home when I was still too young to tie my own shoes.
The Studio Ghibli film, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, stands in contrast to the Disney princess movies that captivated my fellow preschoolers in the mid-’90s. Unlike the glamorous Ariel and Belle, Kiki is a short-haired teen witch who wears a shapeless dress; she embarks on a journey of self-discovery with nothing but a broomstick and a chatty black cat. As a child, I found her determination to prove herself worthy of her magical gifts appealing, but Kiki’s anxiety about failing at this task was what resonated with me most. (I was known all over town as an incredibly anxious kid.) A scene in which she experiences some serious ego death and, in response, plops face down on her bed is still the best portrait of a depressive episode I’ve ever experienced. Of Miyazaki’s many coming-of-age stories about girlhood, Kiki’s Delivery Service has always been my favorite; it’s a masterpiece of storytelling that feels at once intimate and grand, and is affecting at any age.
— Allegra Frank, senior editor
***
Waking Life (streaming on Prime Video)
I don’t recall when exactly I first watched Waking Life. But I do remember that I first came across it when I was searching for answers to the things I felt inside. I was an obsessive philosophy student then; when my professor assigned a few sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which she emailed us—169 to 199, for those curious—I ended up buying the whole book and rifling through it with … suspect levels of comprehension.
Naturally, my desire to engage more deeply with philosophical ideas led me to search for the movies and documentaries they’d inspired. I found Astra Taylor’s 2008 documentary, Examined Life, and followed that up with Waking Life, a surrealist animated film by Richard Linklater from 2001. The plot is somewhat meandering: A man passes through different dreams and talks about the universe with different characters. Every time I watch it, I’m reminded of the wide net of cast members (Alex Jones and Ethan Hawke make an appearance). But I’d argue that the film’s brilliance—the reason I can’t shake it—lies in how it makes me feel. To find Waking Life was to discover an elegant, entrancing call to the act of thinking, an attempt to articulate the things we know to be true.
— Adam Harris, podcast host
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Fantastic Mr. Fox (streaming on Disney+)
I was 14 years old when I first watched Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, and I was instantly mesmerized. It was the first time I truly understood that animated movies aren’t just for kids. It was also the first time—as far as I can remember—that a piece of art made me wish I could be that creative. I was fascinated by how Anderson was able to cultivate such a distinct aesthetic, with his symmetrical shots, quirky soundtracks, and color palettes. How cool was it to watch a movie and immediately know who made it? Could I experience that with other directors too?
Mr. Fox didn’t exactly turn me into a movie nerd, but it did surprise me and bring me a sense of joy that outlasted the trip to the theater. It also started a lifelong hobby of going down internet rabbit holes after I watch films. (And for that, I have to thank the behind-the-scenes video of George Clooney voicing the main character.)
— Mariana Labbate, assistant editor
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Only Yesterday (streaming on HBO Max)
Before I first saw Only Yesterday, I had, like many who have long passed their cartoon-watching days, assumed that animation was largely for kids. This movie completely undid my sense of what that type of filmmaking could be. Slow, bucolic, and reflective, the Studio Ghibli film by Isao Takahata follows Taeko, a burned-out office worker, who ventures out to the Japanese countryside to reset. As she meets locals and bonds with distant relatives while helping with the safflower harvest on their farm, she feels newly in touch with her more whimsical, spirited, and awkward 10-year-old self, who appears during her trip and whose own story and struggles are told interspliced with Taeko’s rural retreat. This film is for anyone who has, in life’s stressful moments, sought dialogue with a younger, less jaded version of themselves. In placing two versions of Taeko beside each other, the movie shows us the subtle, iridescent wisdom of being young—and how, sometimes, to grow and move forward, we first have to go back.
— Kelsey Ables, staff writer
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Inside Out (streaming on Disney+)
I was 20 years old when Inside Out was released, and although we all know that the best Pixar movies are just as affecting for adults as they are for kids, I felt a strong conviction, sitting in the theater, that the movie was meant specifically for me. The film anthropomorphizes emotion, creating an army of colorful feeling-creatures such as Joy, Sadness, and Anger who guide an 11-year-old girl named Riley after her family moves to a new town. There was something genuinely healing about seeing each emotion exist as its own person, with its own needs and desire to be heard, and then watching them collaborate to make up the fullness of a human being.
When I was a young adult, the movie was an opportunity for me to make room for the emotions I had come to suppress. But for even younger viewers, it was an early lesson in what it means to feel. Watching the closing scene, in which Riley finally accepts her own mixed emotions, a small child next to me in the theater turned to his mom and asked incredulously, “You can feel happy and sad at the same time?” I could hear the wheels turning in that little brain, and the whole world opening up.
— Isabel Fattal, senior editor
Here are four Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
Essay
The 10,000-Year Flood
By Sean Flynn
David and Cheryl Chambers bought their property along the Guadalupe River in 2008, the day the for-sale sign went up. They kept it wild and green, a private retreat in the Texas Hill Country where they could lounge in the bed of a pickup and watch the birds and the deer, until just a few years ago, when they decided to convert it into an RV park …
By the evening of Thursday, July 3, 25 guests had checked in. The forecast called for rain, possibly a lot. At 1:18 that afternoon, in fact, the National Weather Service had issued a flood watch for the Hill Country. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering the drought that had been baking central Texas for the past four years. The summer before had been so dry that the Guadalupe briefly stopped flowing, and David had to tell his guests not to splash around in the stagnant river.
The hard rain didn’t fall that evening; it waited until the early morning. And then, in the dark hours before dawn, it fell faster and harder that anyone could recall. Faster and harder, really, than anyone could have imagined.
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