Matt Schley
January 11, 2017 For Japanese film fans, the annual top 10 list by movie magazine Kinema Junpo is a big deal. The twice-monthly magazine, which started publication in 1919, is one of country’s most respected, and their top 10 list is arguably more prestigious than Japan’s version of the Oscars.
So it’s pretty huge that the film that came in at number one on the list is the anime film In This Corner of the World, which was released this past November.
In This Corner of the World, the story of pre-war Hiroshima which took director Sunao Katabuchi over seven years to make and was completed in part thanks to a successful crowdfunding project, is the first anime film to take number one in Kinema Junpo’s top 10 list since My Neighbor Totoro, which was released in 1989.
Kinema Junpo also named Katabuchi 2016’s best director.
In number two was another film that falls squarely into the otaku realm: Shin Godzilla, which was co-directed by Shinji Higuchi and Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno, who won Kinema Junpo’s prize for best screenwriter.
Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, which in 2016 became the second highest-grossing Japanese film of all time, did not make the list.
The complete list is as follows:
1. In This Corner of the World
2. Shin Godzilla
3. Harmonium
4. Destruction Babies
5. The Long Excuse
6. A Bride for Rip Van Winkle
7. Her Love Boils Bathwater
8. Creepy
9. Over the Fence
10. Rage
Source: @molmot
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