The 4:30 Movie: Directed by Kevin Smith. With Siena Agudong, Austin Zajur, Kate Micucci, Ming Chen. A group of teens in the 1980s spend the day theater-hopping. I don’t remember seeing a single advertisement for this being in theaters and only caught wind of it on the Amazon “new movies on 4k” page. It likely would not have been a great theater movie, but it was a perfectly fun coming of age movie about movie theaters and the shenanigans that movie fans used to get up to whilst hanging out at the movie theater. Buy On Amazon!

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin: Directed by Steven Hahn. With Joe Colligan, Carmen Argenziano, Noelle North, Anthony De Longis. Set on the subterranean Mine-World, a band of human worker are treated like slaves under the power of the evil overlord Zygon until one, Orin, unearths the hilt of a mythical sword that only he can master. Escaping the planet, he runs into the rogue smuggler Dagg and a pair of helpful droids and the princess, who all team up to return to the Mine-World with a plan to defeat Zygon and free Orin’s enslaved people. Starchaser: The Legend of Orin...

Porco Rosso: Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. With Shûichirô Moriyama, Tokiko Katô, Bunshi Katsura VI, Tsunehiko Kamijô. In 1930s Italy, a veteran World War I pilot is cursed to look like an anthropomorphic pig. I went into Porco Rosso with modest expectations, not entirely sure what to make of a film about a World War I fighter pilot who, as part of the story, is cursed to live in the body of a pig. What I found, though, was a surprisingly rich and layered experience—one that blended whimsical fantasy with poignant historical context, and mixed lighthearted action with a deeper emotional...

Kiki’s Delivery Service: Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. With Minami Takayama, Rei Sakuma, Kappei Yamaguchi, Keiko Toda. Along with her black cat Jiji, Kiki settles in a seaside town and starts a high-flying delivery service. Here begins her magical encounter with independence and responsibility, making lifelong friends and finding her place in the world. This is the movie that actually got the ball rolling on my desire to watch all the Studio Ghibli films, as one of my coworkers had a stain glass mural in her window that features Jiji all over the place, which I thought was cute and whimsical...

Robot Carnival: Directed by Atsuko Fukushima, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Kôji Morimoto, Takashi Nakamura, Yasuomi Umetsu, Manabu Ôhashi, Hidetoshi Ômori, Katsuhiro Ôtomo. With Kôji Moritsugu, Yayoi Maki, Keiko Hanagata, Kumiko Takizawa. A collection of short stories, made by different animators with “robot” as the working title. This is on Amazon Prime and I fully have no idea how it ended up in front of me, but it was such a fantastic experience that I’m happy it was in my queue, or suggestion list or whatever the mess of Prime lists actually is. It’s a collection of short stories that range...

My Neighbor Totoro: Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. With Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto, Shigesato Itoi, Sumi Shimamoto. When two girls move to the country to be near their ailing mother, they have adventures with the wondrous forest spirits who live nearby. Decidedly lighter fair in comparison to Grave of the Fireflies or even Valley of the Wind, there’s still some extremely emotionally charged moments that really had my heart getting ready to break. I was luckily saved from that sad fate by a well timed catbus, for which I’m grateful that were introduced to earlier in the film, because as a...