Animation festival: Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki is often touted as Japan's answer to Walt Disney, though the similarity doesn't extend much beyond stature.

Howl's Moving Castle, for instance, from which we show the trailer, may boast a token wicked witch, but she winds up no more than a doddering old woman slumbering in an armchair. And in the opening of Miyazaki's Oscar-winning masterpiece Spirited Away, the parents of the protagonist, Chihiro, undergo a gruesome transformation into fleshy squealing pigs. No surprise then, that in the West his films remain predominantly adult, art-house spectacles, incongruous viewing for legions of once-upon-a-time children raised on a diet of cuteness and neat Disney-esque moralising. Elaine Hake