My Neighbors the Yamadas

There were six of them – father Takashi, mother Matsuko, high school student Noboru, little Nonoko, grandmother Shige and dog Pochi. Together, they form the Yamada family, seemingly ordinary and bland, like thousands of others in contemporary Japan. And that's exactly what they are on second glance, but that glance also reveals that there is an understated beauty in their everyday hardships that can put a smile on your face, warm your heart and even impart a lot of wisdom about what happiness is and how to keep it.

Director Isao Takahata is one of the world's most important animators. In 1985, he co-founded the animation studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki and became its second creative pillar. Unlike Miyazaki, who gives vent to his own imagery in his films, Takahata is a director with an ambition to push the possibilities and status of animation as an art form. Under the patronage of Studio Ghibli, he has mostly made adaptations of other peoples' work, but all of them disrupt traditional notions of what kind of audience animated feature films are for, what they are about, or what they look like.