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As an artistic medium, anime not only excels at providing viewers with exciting, buoyant entertainment but also often produces notable thinkpieces that explore the complexities of life and its purpose. The more compact and committed format of movies serves as a particularly suitable avenue to tell such thought-provoking stories. The introspective richness that exists in many anime movies communicates with audiences on a level much deeper than casual enthrallment, encouraging them to piece together the storys hidden explications.

Often obscure and purposefully indirect with their messaging, such anime films allow everyone to come to their own conclusions, transforming ones point of view through the intellectual challenges they provide. Covering a wide range of philosophical topics, from self-realization to societal injustices to the broad understanding of lifes meaning, animes most thought-provoking films are worth the time it takes to piece them together.

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Director Nishikubo Mizuho's ode to post-war survival, Giovanni's Island (Jobanni no shima), offers a heartbreaking account of the struggles of two brothers, as the world they grew up in changes around them, amidst the aftermath of the Second World War. Junpei and his younger brother Kanta live on the island of Shikotan in Northern Japan. Raised by their stoic, serious father and elderly, fisherman grandfather, they find nightly escape from the daily drama of rummaging for food and the threat of bombs through reading 'Night on the Galactic Railroad', a fantasy novel featuring a train that shuttles through the stars, and from whose main characters, Giovanni and Campanelli, the boys received their names. When the war ends, everything changes as the Russians arrive to take control, marking...

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Splendid! For those in the mood for something a bit more serious this holiday season, how about the new, hand-drawn, gorgeous-looking trailer for Production I.G.'s Giovanni's Island (Giovanni no Shima)? As our own Andrew Mack noted in September, Mizuho Nishikubo, Oshii Mamoru's long time animation director, is at the helm of the project, and it's a serious one, as the official synopsis makes clear: In the aftermath of the most devastating conflict mankind had ever experienced, the tiny island of Shikotan became part of the Sakhalin Oblast... and on the unhealed border of this remote corner of the world, friendship among children from two different countries timidly blossomed, striving to overcome language barriers and the waves of history. Inspired by true events. The film is...

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