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Mark Kermode Presents BBC Radio Retrospective on Studio Ghibli

The well-known British film critic Mark Kermode, together with his co-host Ellen E. Jones, have presented a 40-minute BBC radio programme on Studio Ghibli, available on the BBC website here. Part of Kermode and Jone's Screenshot series, the programme notes that this year sees the fortieth anniversary of Studio Ghibli's first film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky.

The programme includes interviews with Michael Dudok de Wit, the director of Studio Ghibli-produced film The Red Turtle, and with the actor Emily Mortimer, who played the younger version of the heroine Sophie in the Disney-produced English dub of Howl's Moving Castle.

There is also an interview with the Irish director Nora Twomey, who talks about how Studio Ghibli was a long-term influence on her. She remembers how she watched Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies for guidance when she was preparing to make her acclaimed animated feature film, The Breadwinner (2017).

Like Grave of the Fireflies, The Breadwinner has a dark subject - the film is about a girl's struggle to protect her family in Kabul under the Taliban. Twomey says, "When you're tackling a story like that, you have to be careful not to push your audience away, to traumatise them."

Of Takahata's film, Twomey says, "It is heartbreaking but Takahata does it in such a masterful way. Some directors will just soften your belly and then punch you in the guts just because they can, but he doesn't doesn't do that. He manages your emotional experience in such a powerful way; you're looking at a storyteller who has dedicated their life to looking after their audience."

The journalist Kambole Campbell praises one of the lesser-known Ghibli films, 1995's Whisper of the Heart, directed by Yoshifumi Kondō.

At the end of the programme, Kermode appears to disparage Goro Miyazaki's 2006 film Tales from Earthsea, which suggests he's changed his mind on it over the years. In a 2008 review for The Guardian newspaper, Kermode defended the film as "a beautifully realised, full-blooded tale of dragons and darkness, good and evil, drugs and damnation."

Anime is defined in the programme as "Japanese-style animation."