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BoJack Horseman has been proof that the best shows take time to grow, even in a streaming-dominated era where the sheer volume of content released from week to week has led to an obsession with the new. When it launched in 2014, Netflix was still relatively new to the original programming game, and its initial successes - House of Cards, Orange is the New Black - were the kind of dense, addictive dramas familiar from prestige cable channels like HBO (Mad Men, Girls) or AMC (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead). On paper, a crudely illustrated cartoon set in Hollywood about an alcoholic, depressed horse actor (voiced by Will Arnett), with a supporting cast of anthropomorphic animals, however, seemed like something thrown together in the eleventh hour of a brainstorm.

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But over time, it has grown in confidence and scope, while getting the knives out, particularly, for Hollywood - known in the show as 'Hollywoo' - and the broken systems supporting the world of celebrity. Come its second season, BoJack Horseman was hailed as ambitious and audacious - and since then its creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has used it to delve into hot-button subjects from gun legislation to women's reproductive rights and dementia.

One of the show's most damning storylines remains season two's Hank After Dark, in which journalist Diane Nguyen (Allison Brie) attempted to expose beloved talk show host Hank Hippopopalous for his alleged abusive behaviour. Not only was it a powerful story about a fictional man's abuse of power, but Diane's monologue to Hank saw her reel off a list of men who have faced real allegations of harassment or abuse, too; Christian Slater, Bill Murray, Woody Allen. It was a scathing shot fired not at a hippo in an imagined world, but at all the real men protected by an industry that stands to lose out financially were alleged abusers really held to account.

Whether it is ending before its time or not, it's impossible to tell from the first eight episodes of the final series, which are as carefully plotted and meticulously arced as ever

Suddenly, BoJack wasn't just a show featuring talking animals in a fantasy land, but a warped looking-glass intended for us to view American society through, the better for us to see its ugliness.

This week, the show begins its last act; launching on Friday, the sixth and final season has been split into two halves, with eight episodes airing now and a further eight coming in January 2020.

Was the decision to wrap it up a creative one? Given that it is one of Netflix's most acclaimed shows, you might have thought so, though Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul, who voices BoJack's friend Todd as well as producing, recently said on Twitter that the show had in fact been cancelled by Netflix - joining the ever-populated graveyard of content that the streaming service had no interest in pursuing any longer.

Whether it is ending before its time or not, though, it's impossible to tell from the first eight episodes of the final series, which are as carefully plotted and meticulously arced as ever.

After the fifth season culminated in BoJack being driven to rehab to deal with a painkiller addiction which saw him assaulting his partner, season six seeks to explore BoJack's difficult journey with himself - while also bringing a couple of long-simmering storylines from previous seasons back into the foreground.

One of the savviest ways it does that is through a new intro, which switches the usual sequence of BoJack stumbling through his house in a stupor for a more cerebral one that sees him witness some of the memories that have scarred him. It features an appearance by his embittered now-dead writing partner Herb (BoJack cut him off after he was outed by the media), a chilling shot of his mother's coffin (BoJack left her, dementia stricken, in a shabby care-home as punishment for his own childhood) and even a callback to one of the show's most shocking moments - the night he tried to seduce his friend's seventeen-year-old daughter after getting her drunk at her prom.

The show's consistent assaults on the rotting, soul-sucking entertainment industry continue to deliver some of its best work.

It sets up a run of episodes where BoJack has to confront the depth of his own failures and realise his own childhood of abuse and neglect has spread, pox-like, and damaged countless people he has come into contact with. These seem to be setting things up for a redemptive finale, in theory at least, though one snagging plot strand from the show's third season - that of his friend and former co-star Sara Lynn's heroin overdose and BoJack's complicity in it - seems set to rear its head in the ugliest way imaginable.

BoJack Horseman has always been particularly acclaimed for the way in which it has explored human trauma, and this season it continues to do so in interesting ways. BoJack's Persian cat ex-girlfriend and agent Princess Carolyn, who finally became a mother via surrogacy in the last series, has a maternal storyline that feels more honest than nearly every equivalent storyline on TV. The show explores her anger, resentment, and sense of duty in her new role, while carefully skewering Hollywood and the media's fetishisation of successful, sassy, fearless, empowered women at the same time as it deftly yanks the ladder up behind them.

In fact, the show's consistent assaults on the rotting, soul-sucking entertainment industry continue to deliver some of its best work. In one of the new episodes, a writer's assistant's strike reveals the powerful execs running Hollywood to be totally incompetent, while a withering storyline about a female superhero franchise called 'Fireflame' ("As soon as we run out of popular male characters, we have to make a movie about her", says one exec) is well-timed given Marvel and DC's current gender equality push.

With the end now in sight, it's going to be fascinating to see where a show this committed to raw honesty will finally leave its central character. BoJack Horseman is not a particularly happy show - though audiences have found a sort of catharsis in its resistance to schmaltz and sentiment. And whether its lead deserves a redemptive end or more true to life is something fans may find themselves reflecting on. Can a happy ending exist for a show so steeped in real-world misery? We'll find out come January.
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How BoJack Horseman became the 21st Century's best animation

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BoJack Horseman has been proof that the best shows take time to grow, even in a streaming-dominated era where the sheer volume of content released from week to week has led to an obsession with the new.

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Disney has produced a few hit films in its time, but Frozen stands as one of the most staggering successes in the studio's nine-decade history. Released in November 2013, the animation became the highest-grossing film of the year - and that was just the beginning. In 2014, every car with children in the back seat - and some without - had the hit single Let It Go on the stereo.

Inevitably, a sequel was made. And, almost inevitably, it's nowhere near as good. Like the first film, this one is directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, scripted by Lee, and punctuated with songs by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. But the catchy Broadway show-stoppers have been replaced by thudding rock-opera power ballads; the glacial clarity of the coming-of-age theme has been replaced by a flurry of mythological codswallop; and the urgency of Anna's journey to bring her sister home has been replaced by the apathy of Elsa's wish to learn about her past.

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It takes an ice age for it to get going. In the early scenes, the film-makers' priority isn't to send Anna and Elsa off on an adventure, but to show off their Nordic haute couture. There are more costume changes in Frozen II than there are at a Beyoncé concert. Most Disney princess animations are intended to sell party dresses to children, but this is the first which is so obviously meant to launch a fashion line.

The film opens with a flashback to the sisters as small children pretending to be in an enchanted forest. This is their father's cue to tell them about the enchanted forest he visited, and so we get another flashback in which a diplomatic party from Arendelle discover a distant land where the people have a magical connection to nature. Once we have swallowed that steaming bowl of exposition, the girls' mother serves up a dollop more - something to do with a mystic river. And then, at last, the film's title flashes on the screen.

In the present day, Anna (Kristen Bell) and Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) are happily ruling the fjord-side kingdom of Arendelle, but they and their friends have some niggling problems. Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) wants to propose to Anna, but he isn't sure how. Olaf (Josh Gad), the sentient snowman, is fretting about the impermanence of all things, a concern which leads to a couple of endearing songs, but not much else. And Elsa is troubled by a mysterious psychic voice calling her to the far north. This leads to a song, too, in which she declares that she isn't going to answer the voice's siren call, but then changes her mind before the final chorus.

And so, for the vaguest of reasons, the gang sets off on another quest. Unfortunately, they don't encounter any sneaky villains or ravenous wolves, and so the filmmakers manufacture some conflict by turning Anna into a co-dependent brat who keeps snapping at Elsa and Kristoff. Was she this tetchy and judgemental in the last film? I doubt the others would have rushed to her aid in the finale if she had been.

Lacking any real jeopardy, Frozen II is a meandering psychedelic journey involving standing stones, elemental spirits, time-warping glaciers, the Dark Sea, and a supernatural fog reminiscent of Alex Garland's sci-fi horror movie, Annihilation. It's also reminiscent of a Tolkien fantasy saga, although its fixation on the characters' origins and their homeland's politics may bring back traumatic memories of the Star Wars prequels. The script tries to answer the questions raised in the first film, even though none of them needed answering, but its convoluted explanations are so perplexing that there may need to be a third film just to answer all the questions raised in this one. Strangely, one sequence comes very close to explaining why Kristoff had no parents in Frozen, just a reindeer and an adoptive family of trolls, but someone must have cut the sequence in which everything becomes clear.

Narratively, Frozen II is a mess, an avalanche of half-formed ideas which might have been more suited to a spin-off novel or a video game, and which leaves us asking WTF, or What The Frozen? And yet, beyond its thicket of tangled concepts and subplots, there is nothing to it but one small revelation which astute viewers will have predicted after five minutes. Remember how we were all fooled into thinking that dastardly Prince Hans was the hero in Frozen? The twists in Frozen II are fumbled in comparison. When your story relies on snow statues coming to life at convenient moments and acting out arguments that took place 30 years earlier, that's probably a sign that your screenplay could do with another two or three drafts.

In a way, it's admirable that Buck and Lee didn't play it safe, and that instead of making a simple fairy-tale they attempted a world-building, mind-expanding epic. It certainly won't prompt many karaoke nights or repertory-cinema singalongs, but their barely comprehensible folly is so weird and bleak, and so full of magnificent, hallucinatory imagery, that it could be embraced by students as a midnight movie. Younger Elsa and Anna fans, on the other hand, will either be covering their eyes in distress or scratching their heads in confusion. Frozen II will leave them cold.

★★☆☆☆
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Frozen II review: 'An avalanche of half-formed ideas'

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Disney has produced a few hit films in its time, but Frozen stands as one of the most staggering successes in the studio's nine-decade history. Released in November 2013, the animation became the highest-grossing film of the year - and that was just the beginning.

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Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit is a sweet-natured, cheerful, brightly-coloured family comedy, that is also a howl of rage at the cruelty of war, Nazism, and the way adults impose grotesque dogmas on naive children. Skipping back and forth between silliness and sadness, between happiness and horror, it is a film that, even when it isn't entirely working, astonishes you with its very existence. A feel-good comedy? With children? About anti-Semitism? And Hitler? We won't be getting many more of those this year.
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The charm and offbeat humour of Jojo Rabbit will be familiar to anyone who has seen Waititi's previous films, including Thor: Ragnarok, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows. Set in Germany towards the end of World War Two, it's also vaguely reminiscent of the comedy sketch by British duo Mitchell and Webb in which one SS officer asks another, "Are we the baddies?" The point is that the film's tiny 10-year-old hero, Johannes Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), believes that the Nazis are definitely not the baddies. His idea of fun is to learn how to throw knives and burn books while he's at a Hitler Youth training camp in the woods, and he reveres the Führer so much that Adolf, played by Waititi himself, keeps popping up as his imaginary best buddy. The training-camp sequence is hilarious, but there is a grim insight beneath the jokes: for a generation of Germans, learning how to fight for Hitler was an honour and a treat.

I've never seen Scarlett Johansson being as touching as she is here

But maybe Johannes isn't the Aryan superman the Fatherland needs, after all. He may boast that he is "massively into swastikas", but he can't bring himself to kill a rabbit, which is why the camp instructors land him with the nickname Jojo Rabbit. When he comes home from the camp, his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) doesn't seem quite as pro-Hitler as she once was, either. Somehow, Johansson continues to be a revelation in role after role. As superb as she always is, I've never seen her being as touching as she is here. With the help of a nightly bottle of red wine, Rosie manages to stay positive and playful for the sake of her son, even though her husband has been posted to some distant country and her daughter is dead.

Johannes doesn't guess his mother's true feelings until he discovers that she has hidden a teenage Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), in the walls of his late sister's bedroom. He is appalled - and slightly surprised that this inhuman monster doesn't appear to have horns. But once the pair of reluctant housemates get talking, Johannes is forced to question whether everything he has been told about Jews is strictly true. There is even a chance that friendship will conquer fear, and love will conquer hate.

Adapted from Caging Skies, a novel by Christine Leunens, Jojo Rabbit has the plot of a conventional, sentimental Holocaust story, and it isn't as powerful as it might have been. This isn't the fault of the two terrific leads: both Davis and McKenzie have the conviction and comic timing to match any adult actor. But it's clear from the start that Johannes's heart isn't really in Nazism - he's just too nice - so his change of attitude towards Elsa doesn't feel like a world-shaking wrench. Similarly, Elsa is 10 times braver and tougher than he is, so there is none of the jeopardy and suspense that should be part of any film about a fervent young Nazi finding a Jewish girl in his house.

Some viewers will complain that the subject is no laughing matter

Plotting aside, though, the balance between light and darkness is remarkable. Jojo Rabbit is designed and lit to look as warm and cosy as a fairy tale, but then, just when you're relaxing and enjoying it, it shows a row of executed resistance leaders hanging from a gibbet in the town square. Likewise, the Nazi officers, including a boozy, disillusioned captain played with aplomb by Sam Rockwell, and a priggish Gestapo agent played by Stephen Merchant, can be innocuous in one scene and frightening in the next. But most of the time they are cartoonish fools, speaking English with on-off German accents and using anachronistic slang. Rebel Wilson - as a camp leader - gets to mutter "O M Gott". Waititi's goofy Hitler cries: "Correctamundo!"

The writer-director is cheating, to an extent: if a small boy idolised Hitler, it's hardly likely that he would imagine him to be the petulant, pot-bellied, baggy-trousered buffoon portrayed here. But you can forgive a little conceptual slipperiness when the results are as funny as Jojo Rabbit. And perhaps in depicting the Nazis as a clueless and immature bunch, the film gets at a truth that more traditional Third Reich dramas miss: however terrifying the Nazis' ideology might have been, it was also essentially childish nonsense.

Some viewers will complain that the subject is no laughing matter. Waititi's riposte seems to be that, actually, it is vital that we laugh at Nazis - and Jojo Rabbit ensures that we do just that.

★★★★☆
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Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit is a sweet-natured, cheerful, brightly-coloured family comedy, that is also a howl of rage at the cruelty of war, Nazism, and the way adults impose grotesque dogmas on naive children. Skipping back and forth between silliness and sadness, between happiness and horror, it is a film that, even when it isn't entirely working, astonishes you with its very existence.

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The first thing to say about Cats is that the cats themselves look fine. When t he trailer for Tom Hooper's film was released in July, online commenters caterwauled about how creepy the actors appeared, with their ill-fitting coats of computer-generated fur. But the effects team have clearly been working flat out ever since, and now the digital pelts are bright, sleek and seamless. Ears twitch and tails flick, whiskers catch the light, and hair quivers softly in the night breeze. Come to think of it, the CGI fur might be the best thing about the whole project.

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The worst thing about it? That would be the story. Based on Andrew Lloyd Webber's international smash-hit musical, which was adapted in turn from TS Eliot's poetry collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the film begins one night when a kitten named Victoria (Francesca Hayward, a ballerina with a dazzling smile and a trilling voice) is dumped in an alleyway in 1930s London. She is adopted by a tribe of strays called the Jellicles - a word you hear so often that it becomes a kind of sonic torture. Her new furry friends show her around the cobbled backstreets, then they gather in a derelict theatre to meet Old Deuteronomy (Dame Judi Dench), their respected and dignified matriarch (so... Judi Dench, basically). Tonight, at the Jellicle Ball, she will decide which of them gets to float up to the Heaviside Layer and be born again - assuming, that is, that her deliberations aren't spoilt by Macavity (Idris Elba), a villain with teleportation powers, like Nightcrawler from the X-Men.

There is something daring about a musical that purports to be family-friendly festive entertainment, but which counts as an avant-garde experiment

Unless you're on strong mind-altering substances while you're watching the film, you will either be baffled or bored by this pseudo-religious nonsense, which was cobbled together by Trevor Nunn for the original stage production in 1981, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with the behaviour of real cats. Personally, I can't help respecting how defiantly illogical it all is. There is something daring about a musical that purports to be family-friendly festive entertainment, but which is actually so alienating and out-there that it counts as an avant-garde experiment. And I'm not just talking about Ray Winstone's truly terrifying attempt to sing a melody.

But while Cats is admirable on some level, that's not the same as being enjoyable - and there is little in it to make you laugh or cry, let alone to purr with pleasure. The screenplay is written by Hooper (director of The King's Speech and Les Misérables) and Lee Hall (Billy Elliot, Rocketman), but there is no characterisation and no emotional journey, and they can't have laboured for very long over such zingers as "Look what the cat dragged in," and "Cat got your tongue?". The film is essentially a lightweight but largely joyless cabaret in which the acts take turns in the spotlight to croon their signature songs.

Cats needed more narrative, more comedy, more show-stopping tunes, and more choreography that hadn't been chopped to ribbons by the editors

Rebel Wilson sticks to her customary dazed, deadpan persona as Jennyanydots, a pampered housecat who trains the resident mice and cockroaches. Naoimh Morgan and Danny Collins get the liveliest production number as a pair of gleeful burglars, Rumpleteazer and Mungojerrie. James Corden has some jaunty fun as Bustopher Jones, the aristo-cat who raids the bins of the West End's most exclusive clubs. Taylor Swift has a seductive cameo as the breathy Bombalurina, and she also co-writes the film's sole new track (which didn't make the shortlist for the best original song Oscar). And Jennifer Hudson as the outcast Grizabella blasts out a gale-force Memory, as if to reprise the tear-stained power-ballad routine that Anne Hathaway pioneered in Hooper's Les Misérables.

If they and the rest of the cast were in front of you, live on stage, there would probably be enough energy in the room for it to qualify as a great night at the theatre. But cinema is a different medium. To qualify as a great film musical, Cats would have needed more narrative, more comedy, more show-stopping tunes, and more choreography that hadn't been chopped to ribbons by the editors. If the film had made the slightest bit of sense, too, that would have been a bonus. Cats isn't the cat-astrophe that everyone either feared or hoped for back in July, but it isn't a triumphant vindication of Hooper's vision, either. After all that fuss, it scrapes by - but only by a whisker.

★★☆☆☆

Director: Tom Hooper

Run-time: 110 min
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The first thing to say about Cats is that the cats themselves look fine. When t he trailer for Tom Hooper's film was released in July, online commenters caterwauled about how creepy the actors appeared, with their ill-fitting coats of computer-generated fur.

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For the first time, the animated output of Japan's Studio Ghibli is being made available on a streaming service, with Netflix beginning to serve up 21 of the movies in batches from 1 February. (Although they won't be available in the US, Canada and Japan, HBO Max will be showing them at some point.) There are two types of people - those who have never heard of Studio Ghibli, and those who love the movies with all their heart. If you have seen any of the films put out by the studio, founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, it would either have been in the cinema, on DVD or via their occasional appearance on TV, but the Netflix deal is certain to open them up to a whole new audience.

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Japan, of course, is famous for its animated movies, or anime, but Ghibli (the name means 'desert wind' in Libyan, chosen by Miyazaki to signify that the venture was going to blow through the existing industry) is in a league of its own, and its gorgeous painted visions set the template for many more movies that came after its initial releases. But with more than 20 movies, all very different, to choose from when Netflix opens the Ghibli gates, where should you start?
If you want an Oscar winner...
Begin with Spirited Away (2001), which won the best animated feature trophy at the 2003 Academy Awards, and pretty much encapsulates the whole Ghibli ethos. Thanks to its high profile, this is often the movie that has introduced people to Ghibli. It's a stunningly-realised tale of a 10-year-old girl, Chihiro, who is travelling with her parents to her new home. When her father takes a shortcut, Chihiro ends up lost and alone in the spirit world, and has to navigate a dreamlike landscape, populated by increasingly grotesque characters, in order to save her parents.
If you want to feel unalloyed joy...
Then you need My Neighbour Totoro (1988) in your life. This is the movie that launched a million plush toys, and the titular wood spirit - a big, cuddly, furry monster - is the symbol of Studio Ghibli. Set in the 1950s against a beautiful, pastoral backdrop, it tells the story of two young girls and their father who move into a new country home to be near the hospital where their mother is recuperating. There they meet Totoro and his friends, notably the incredible Catbus. The plot is slight but it doesn't matter - it's just wonderful, for younger children and adults alike.
If you want shapeshifting raccoons...
And let's face it, who doesn't? Especially when they use their scrotums to such comic effect. Pom Poko (1994) is like nothing you've ever seen before and you're just going to have to watch it. Like many Ghibli movies this has a strong environmental message, as a tribe of raccoons (prominent in Japanese folklore) have to settle their own differences to stop developers razing the wooded hillside where they live to make way for a housing development.
If you want rousing pulp adventure...
There's no shortage of thrills in Porco Rosso (1992), which like a lot of the studio's output has a European flavour rather than a Japanese one. Literally 'The Red Pig', Porco Rosso is an Italian World War One flying ace transformed by a curse into a humanoid pig, now working as a bounty hunter battling sky pirates over the Adriatic. It's got excitement, melodrama and a touching love story, and feels like the best rousing Golden Age Hollywood movie that never was.
If you want a fairytale fantasy...
That description doesn't really even touch the sides of Howl's Moving Castle (2004). Loosely based on the 1986 Diana Wynne Jones novel, it features a strong anti-war message (apparently fuelled by Miyazaki's opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq) as two feuding kingdoms in a European-flavoured fantasy world go head-to-head, with the maverick magician Howl caught in the middle as his precarious castle on legs criss-crosses the war-torn territories. Young milliner Sophie is cursed by the Witch of the Waste and transformed into an old woman who gets caught up in Howl's fight to not be drafted into the devastating war. Utterly captivating and memorable.
If you want to know the true cost of war... (Note: This isn't going to be streamed on Netflix, but we thought it was still worth a mention.)
Grave of the Fireflies is not an easy watch but it is a necessary one. One of the earlier Ghibli features, released in 1988, it tells the story of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, who are fighting to survive in Japan during the final days of World War Two. Unlike the more famous manga Barefoot Gen, which covers similar ground in comic-book form, Grave of the Fireflies does not focus on the atomic bombing of Japan, as Western audiences might expect, but on the blanket firebombing of cities such as Kobe. It is no less horrific for that - possibly more so, as it is a lesser-known tale. With their mother dead in a bombing raid and their father fighting with the Japanese Navy, the children are forced to fend for themselves. Be warned: it's distressing and powerful, and will leave you feeling a little shell-shocked.
If you want contemporary drama...
Studio Ghibli has you well served with several movies. Whisper of the Heart (1995) is a coming-of-age story about a bookish girl, Shizuku, who finds that all the books she borrows from the library have been checked out by the same boy, and resolves to find him. Only Yesterday (1991) is a gentle slow-burner (with some rather upsetting scenes in flashback) about a 27-year-old woman looking back on her life and the choices she's made. From Up On Poppy Hill, from 2011, is directed by Miyazaki's son, Gorō, and frames the recurring Ghibli theme of supposed progress sweeping away tradition around two young people and their fight to save a school clubhouse from demolition.
If you want adaptations of much-loved books...
As well as Howl's Moving Castle, Ghibli has used several well-known novels as jumping-off points for its movies. One of the studio's most recent films, When Marnie Was There (2014), is based on Joan G Robinson's 1967 novel, and it's a moving, atmospheric tale of a 12-year-old girl who begins a friendship with the mysterious Marnie, who is not all she seems. Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952) gets the Ghibli treatment in Arrietty (2010), which perhaps doesn't make everyone's list of favourites, mainly due to its familiarity. And Tales From Earthsea (2006) is extremely loosely based on Ursula K Le Guin's quartet of novels, and is not entirely successful as an adaptation, though it has its fans.
If you want a fantasy with a strong environmental message...
Then Princess Mononoke is for you. Released in 1997, it was Ghibli's most successful movie until Spirited Away. It is set in a fanatical feudal Japan where a young prince is caught up in a conflict between the ecologically-rapacious denizens of an industrial town intent on clearing a huge forest to mine for iron, and the diverse spirits who live in the threatened woods. It's almost a companion piece to My Neighbour Totoro, with more battles and demons and rather unpleasant people.
If you want some girl power...
Pretty much all Studio Ghibli movies feature strong female characters, but Kiki's Delivery Service (2003) is a joyous celebration of girls doing it for themselves, as young witch Kiki hops on her broomstick as soon as she turns 13 and heads off with her chatty cat Jiji to offer her witchy services to the citizens of a busy town. Things don't go according to plan, but that's the pleasure in this movie's message - watching a young girl gain her independence and learning from her mistakes, eventually gaining the confidence she needs to forge her own path in life.
If you want something slightly different...
Well, all the Ghibli films are different, but two stand out as being animated in a completely different style to the studio's usual look. The Tale of Princess Kaguya is one of the more recent movies, released in 2013 and based on the folk story The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. The final film directed by Takahata before his death in 2018, it's about a poor couple who find a tiny girl growing inside a bamboo shoot, and it is almost like an old painting come to life. Similarly, My Neighbours The Yamadas (1999) is a charming little tale that starts as a family comedy before heading into surreal territory, yet is always warm and happy, more like an animated comic strip.
If you want something with cats...
And, let's face it, who doesn't? We've already mentioned Catbus, but The Cat Returns (2002) is the moggy's pyjamas for feline fans. It's a heartwarming fantasy about a young girl who can talk to cats, and after she saves what appears to be a street cat from being hit by a truck she gets inducted into the often perilous world of the Cat Kingdom. Pure escapism, and nothing wrong with that. And one character is a dapper puss called The Baron, a statuette who comes to life. In a rare Ghibli crossover, the Baron statue also appears in Whisper of the Heart.
If you want to watch the films chronologically...
You'll need to start with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the film Miyazaki made and released in 1984 and which led to the creation of Studio Ghibli. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic future with gigantic marauding insects, and has some of Miyazaki's nascent themes present, including his ecological bent as the story focuses on a young woman who hopes to find a way for humans to co-exist with the mutated insect creatures in the jungle.
If you want a slice of reality...
Ghibli's only proper biopic is The Wind Rises, released in 2013 and telling a fictionalised life story of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the infamous Mitsubishi Zero that formed the basis of Japan's aerial might in World War Two. This being a Ghibli film, though, it's not some tub-thumping celebration of a gung-ho life. Horikoshi dreams of flying planes but his poor eyesight doesn't allow it, so he throws himself into engineering, and is devastated when his designs are used for war. This was Miyazaki's last film before his short-lived retirement, which he came out of in 2017 to direct the as-yet unreleased How Do You Live?.
If you want to guarantee your kids ask you for a goldfish...
Watch the utterly charming and at times very exciting Ponyo (2008). That is the name given to a goldfish found by a young boy called Sōsuke, but in reality she is one of many shape-shifting siblings who live in an underwater community off Japan's coast. Her father fears she has been kidnapped, and launches an assault on the human world to get her back. There's an extremely tense tsunami scene and meditations on the true nature of friendship. Highly recommended.
If you want big steampunk robots...
The first proper film under the Studio Ghibli banner was Laputa: Castle In The Sky, a rollicking adventure released in 1986 with a vast, aerial city, sky pirates, airships, a quest by two young heroes to protect a magic crystal, and, yes, big old steampunk robots. Apparently some of the architecture in the film is inspired by Wales, which Miyazaki visited in 1984 when the miner's strike was in full flow.
If you want to be an absolute completist...
There are two films that are not really considered part of the Studio Ghibli canon proper, yet are definitely worth your time, especially after you've exhausted the main movies. Ocean Waves (1993) was made for TV, and was a way for the studio to try out some of its younger animators, with the intention to make a romantic story to appeal to young people. It's a bit soapy in parts, but worth a look. And at the other end of the spectrum is The Castle of Cagliostro, a crime caper that was very pre-Ghibli with its 1979 release, but is notable for being Miyazaki's directorial debut, and is available on DVD.
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Studio Ghibli films: An indispensable guide

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For the first time, the animated output of Japan's Studio Ghibli is being made available on a streaming service, with Netflix beginning to serve up 21 of the movies in batches from 1 February. (Although they won't be available in the US, Canada and Japan, HBO Max will be showing them at some point.)

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When Natalie Portman wore a dress championing female film directors to the Oscars, she was praised by many - but also faced a backlash.

" You are the problem," actress Rose McGowan said. "Yes, you, Natalie. Lip service is the problem. Fake support of other women is the problem."

McGowan argued that Portman doesn't "walk the walk" because she doesn't have a great track record of working with female directors herself.

Portman has now responded, saying the reason is that there are "gatekeepers at every level" who prevent such films getting made.

Here's the full story.

Why did Portman's dress cause a stir?

Portman walked the red carpet at Sunday night's Oscars wearing a custom Dior gown and cape, which took more than 900 hours to make.

Those who looked closely spotted that the cape was adorned with the names of some of the female directors who weren't nominated at this year's Academy Awards.

For the ninth year in the past decade, all five of the best director nominees were male.

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The female directors highlighted by Portman included Lorene Scafaria (who directed Hustlers), Lulu Wang (The Farewell), Greta Gerwig (Little Women), Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) and Melina Matsoukas (Queen & Slim).

The Oscar-winning actress has form when it comes to this issue. While presenting the best director category at the 2018 Golden Globes, she said: "And here are the all-male nominees."

What was the response to the dress?

To begin with, widespread support.

"Not all heroes wear capes, but Natalie Portman is now one of them," declared Harper's Bazaar.

"Bravo, Natalie," added Marie Claire.

However, a few social media sleuths began looking into Portman's filmography, which showed the actress has only worked with two female directors in her career.

And one of them was herself.

Furthermore, her own production company, Handsomecharlie Films, has not yet made a film with a female director (again, other than Portman herself).

Two tweets in particular that drew attention to these facts received more than 300,000 likes between them.

Image Copyright @AngelaLMorabito @AngelaLMorabito Report

Image Copyright @AngelaLMorabito @AngelaLMorabitoReport

What did Rose McGowan say?

In a Facebook post, the Grindhouse actress wrote: "[This was] the kind of protest that gets rave reviews from the mainstream media for its bravery.

"Brave? No, not by a long shot. More like an actress acting the part of someone who cares. As so many of them do.

"I find Portman's type of activism deeply offensive to those of us who actually do the work. I'm not writing this out of bitterness, I am writing out of disgust. I just want her and other actresses to walk the walk."

McGowan highlighted Portman's poor track record when it came to working with and hiring female directors.

"What is it with actresses of your ilk?," she continued. "You 'A-listers' could change the world if you'd take a stand instead of being the problem.

"Stop pretending you're some kind of champion for anything other than yourself. Until you and your fellow actresses get real, do us all a favour and hang up your embroidered activist cloak, it doesn't hang right."

How has Portman responded?

While acknowledging the criticisms about her own previous work, Portman defended herself and drew attention to other projects she's worked on which had women at the helm.

"It is true I've only made a few films with women," she said in a statement issued to BBC News.

"In my long career, I've only gotten the chance to work with female directors a few times - I've made shorts, commercials, music videos and features with Marya Cohen, Mira Nair, Rebecca Zlotowski, Anna Rose Holmer, Sofia Coppola, Shirin Neshat and myself."

The actress added that other projects with female directors, which are not public knowledge, have fallen through.

"Unfortunately, the unmade films I have tried to make are a ghost history," she said.

"Female films have been incredibly hard to get made at studios, or to get independently financed. If these films do get made, women face enormous challenges during the making of them.

"I have had the experience a few times of helping get female directors hired on projects which they were then forced out of because of the conditions they faced at work.

"After they are made, female-directed films face difficulty getting into festivals, getting distribution and getting accolades because of the gatekeepers at every level.

"So I want to say, I have tried, and I will keep trying. While I have not yet been successful, I am hopeful that we are stepping into a new day."
Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

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Natalie Portman responds to Oscars dress row

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When Natalie Portman wore a dress championing female film directors to the Oscars, she was praised by many - but also faced a backlash. " You are the problem," actress Rose McGowan said. "Yes, you, Natalie. Lip service is the problem. Fake support of other women is the problem."

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After a series of racially motivated attacks on the West Indian residents of West London's Notting Hill area in August 1958, Trinidadian human rights activist Claudia Jones decided to create a special gathering in an attempt to unify the community.
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Called the 'Caribbean Carnival', and broadcast on the BBC, it was held the following January, in St Pancras town hall. Little could Jones have then imagined that, more than 60 years on, this expression of community solidarity would have grown to become the largest street party in Europe, held every August bank holiday weekend - and an event that has become a cornerstone of British culture.

This year, to keep people protected from the pandemic, the Notting Hill Carnival (NHC) will be streamed online as a series of events celebrating its origins and driving spirit. And, even if people can't gather face to face, it feels more vital than ever to channel that spirit.

This has been a challenging year, with the pandemic punctuated by street protests following the murder of George Floyd in America. How are we as black Britons to process these troubles and heal? In part, perhaps, by appreciating the strength of our community - which is where Carnival comes in. We have six decades of shared memories, that resonate from St Pancras town hall to the present day.
The meaning of Carnival
Carnival has always reflected the energy and activism of the times, while being many things to many people. My journey with it started in the 1980s, when my Ghanaian father would drive me from our home in the London suburbs into the heart of the street festival. Dad was a taxi driver, whose raison d'etre was conversation: he revelled at the chance to chat with more than one person at a time, and exchanged a ceremonial 'hello!' with every passer-by, which left little time for dancing.

However, my experience of Carnival changed when I attended with my extended Trinidadian family. This was the early 1990s, by which time the crowds seemed to have doubled. I remember holding our cans of Red Stripe above our heads to avoid spillages, bodies pushing heavily behind us, as we navigated our way towards the sound systems. Our traditions of jerk food and dancing continue today, but the experience is now enriched by taking my daughter to enjoy the painted revellers and costumes along the parade.

To historian and NHC ambassador Fiona Compton, the origins of Carnival are revolutionary. They go back to the 17th Century when, as European colonisers held Lent masquerade balls, enslaved Africans staged their own festivities. But as Compton points out, these were a form of rebellion.

"They would observe, mimic and incorporate their own African masteries, music, costume making and so on; a ridicule of their oppressors," she says. "Within Carnival, there's a mission of spirituality, a celebration of freedom. The procession is the representation of the freedom of movement that we didn't have before. Even the steel pan [drum]. There were laws that you couldn't use this skin or whatever to make drums, so the steel pan is an improvisation. 'We can't use a skin drum? Okay, well, we could use oil drums.' Everything in Carnival is revolutionary action."

Compton was born in St Lucia. She moved to London 20 years ago to take her place on a photography course at the London College of Printing, one of the UK's most respected creative institutions. However she was disappointed at the lack of Caribbean representation within the work she studied there. "I felt like, even within the active Black British photographers that they brought up during the course, I didn't find it relatable because a lot of [Caribbean] history has a Jamaican focus. If you're going to speak about the Caribbean, you're put this under this one umbrella. And I felt frustrated."

Compton left university with her degree, but wanted to improve on the education that she had received and teach others about the Caribbean's rich history. "What about people from St Vincent? The people of Asian heritage from Guyana, the Chinese Jamaicans, Guadeloupe and the Francophone Caribbean? They have very little voice within the Caribbean narrative. In many ways [in college] we were oppressed by the narratives that were being put forward about my own people. So that became one of my main focuses." Today she holds education workshops through her online platform Know Your Caribbean.

As a Carnival ambassador, it is important to Compton that its historical roots are preserved in the current narrative. "Carnival is very important to me. It would be so wonderful if we all collectively had this understanding of the spiritual practice regarding it." In tandem with that, Compton says its social and political origins need to be properly understood too. "I remember there was a story with Claudia [Jones]. The police said 'Listen, if you come out it's gonna be a huge problem.' We still went ahead with it, and I think it's a really beautiful thing for people to contextualise. Carnival is a protest."
Its musical impact
Artistically, Carnival's influence on British music cannot be underestimated, via the calypso and reggae tunes that have been at its core. "When you look back, it's [music] filled with bravado, and political and social commentary," explains Compton. "Kids who are second and third generation Caribbean see how their parents would respond to the music, or just pick up some of the lyrics; that has a lot of influence, maybe as much as American rap music.

"It is that kind of showmanship as well, you know... when you are battling," she adds, referring to the influence of the sound system culture of Caribbean music, where members of different crews of musicians pit their skills against each other. "All of this develops into what we see in the UK music scene now."

Meanwhile, as a measure of the importance of Carnival to global music culture, it's worth mentioning that in 1997 hip-hop artists Jay Z, Busta Rhymes and Lil' Kim took to the NHC stage. Later, in 1999, Beyonce Knowles and her then-band Destiny's Child performed at Carnival following the release of their album, The Writing's on the Wall.

As Carnival has evolved, however, it has grappled with different issues. I, for one, miss the days of Carnival during my childhood: the streets were freer, the curfews were more relaxed.

Over the decades there have been complaints about its increasing commercialisation, which is an element Compton also takes issue with. "It is growing and growing, but I feel like a lot of the foundation is shrinking as it grows. I feel it's getting stifled by big money brands, profiteering, without having the context [of its origins]."

What's more, the gentrification of Notting Hill has gone hand in hand with criticisms over excessive policing of the event. Many wealthy local residents now leave their homes for the weekend, their absence representative of a gap in inter-community relations.

At the same time, a recurring focus on crime at Carnival is at odds with what the numbers tell us. A Huffington Post investigation last year revealed that, for every 10,000 people, Manchester's Creamfields festival has more than 23 arrests, and Glastonbury - perceived to be unproblematic in terms of crime - has just over three arrests. Yet while NHC also has just over 3 arrests per 10,000 attendees, many have contested that it receives much greater scrutiny when it comes to violence at the event as a result of racial bias.

Despite this, NHC is what it is today thanks to the talent and dedication of a team and community. Carnival is about spiritual healing and the celebration of important ancestral traditions.

One treasured member of the NHC creative community was award-winning wire-bender Lincoln Rahamut. His work literally held together carnival costumes not just in Notting Hill, but all over the world, and he was one of the few remaining wire-bending craftsmen. Sadly, he passed away this year.

Compton was commissioned by NHC to create a short film on Rahamut's work in 2018. Remembering the time she spent with him, she says he exemplified the real spirit of Carnival. "When you speak to the people who started all of these things or continued these legacies, if you sit and have a conversation with them, they will give so much and so openly, because they really want people to continue this. They know that they're not going to be around forever. It's not just magic that they create, but it's their willingness to give, to share, to teach, and to continue.

"Even though we cannot physically be on the road this year, it's a great opportunity to bring in the historical, cultural and spiritual context to Carnival," she says. "It's not going to take away from your experience, it's just going to add to the experience."
For information on this year's virtual event, visit To listen to the full interview with Fiona Compton on the origins of NHC Carnival, go to www.shadepodcast.co.uk. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. www.nhcarnival.org.
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The street party that revolutionised Britain

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After a series of racially motivated attacks on the West Indian residents of West London's Notting Hill area in August 1958, Trinidadian human rights activist Claudia Jones decided to create a special gathering in an attempt to unify the community.

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You could easily miss it amid the romp and revelry that surrounds Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, as he leaps from his cheetah-drawn chariot after clapping eyes on the beautiful Ariadne: that tiny detail that transforms Titian's passionate painting of love-at-first-sight into something a little less fragrant.
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The work, inspired by a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses, depicts the instant Bacchus's boisterous posse happens upon a heartbroken Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos, and has long been cherished for its sensuous portrayal of 'the way in which the world seems to come to a stop at the moment when people fall for each other,' as the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has described it.

Bacchus and Ariadne depicts the moment when the god Bacchus first comes upon the princess Ariadne on the island of Naxos (Credit: National Gallery)

Smack dab in the centre of his canvas, Titian has carefully, if curiously, positioned a caper flower, whose ivory petals and radiant bristle of exploding stamens are rendered with meticulous botanical detail. Follow the trajectory of the caper's strangely overextended pistil and it catches in its stigma's crosshairs the floating crotch of Bacchus, who, blasted from his seat, is frozen forever in mid-air, in what is surely among the most ungainly poses in all of art history.

A mischievous levitation

That the Latin name for the caper flower, Capparis spinosa, is related to the Italian word capriolare (meaning 'to jump in the air'), is a droll enough visual/verbal play to suggest that Titian is intentionally teasing us with the placement of the prickly perennial plant directly under the bouncing Bacchus. But it is the plant's medicinal use, since antiquity, as a natural carminative (or remedy for excessive flatulence) that reveals the artist is truly letting rip with some mischievous fun. In the context of Titian's carefully deployed caper, Bacchus's explosive propulsion from his seat appears more wittily, if crudely, choreographed by Titian, who demystifies the lovestruck levitation by providing us with a more down-to-earth explanation for the cheeky lift-off. In Titian's retelling of Ovid's myth, Bacchus has been hoisted by his own pungent petard, as Shakespeare, who likewise loved toilet humour, might have said.

Famously fond of flatulence himself, Shakespeare couldn't resist squeezing potty puns into his plays. Hanging in the air behind the phrase 'thereby hangs a tail', from Othello, for example, is the lingering whiff of broken wind. Rather than crude blemishes that besmirch his plays' achievement, however, such coarse scents attest to Shakespeare's full range of observation, his depth of sensitivity to every clench and contour of being here. They show that, in capturing all of life, Shakespeare holds nothing back (or in) and that his works embrace all of human experience - the serious and the silly, the melodious and discordant, the fragrant and the foul.

In the centre, a caper flower, which is a natural remedy for flatulence, is coupled with a satyr, a figure also associated with the condition (Credit: National Gallery)

So too with Titian. The 16th-Century Venetian master's Bacchus and Ariadne, commissioned by the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso I d'Este, for display in the Camerino d'Alabastro, a private room of his palazzo, is widely revered as an explosion of intense emotion through bold colour. The rich, rippling crimson of Bacchus's drapery and the lush ultramarine of Ariadne's cloak seem magicked from a purity of pigments powderised by the gods themselves. But what truly makes the scene so urgent and powerful is its heightened awareness of all the textures of this, the world we share with those mythic beings - a realm of rich hues, musical merriment, drunken delirium, and, yes, appalling pongs.

If you doubt that Titian in his day would have been alive to the importance of an odiferous dimension to Ovid's vision, compare the painter's visual portrayal of Bacchus and his half-cut crew with a verbal illustration of the same rambunctious retinue by his exact contemporary, François Rabelais. The fifth and final book of the French Renaissance writer's magnum opus, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, describes at length the discovery in a temple of a mosaic that features Bacchus and his gang. "The satyrs, captains, sergeants, and corporals of companies, sounding the orgies with cornets, in a furious manner went round the army," Rabelais writes, melting the artwork into language, "skipping, capering, bounding, jerking, farting, flying out at heels, kicking and prancing like mad..."

Mapping Rabelais's verbal description onto Titian's canvas, one sees that the elements are all there - the skipping and bounding, the jerking and kicking, the flying at the heels and prancing like mad, and, indeed, even the capering and farting. In order to follow the trajectory of the caper's distended pistil to the buoyant bottom of Bacchus, our gaze must first bisect the legs and groin of an impish satyr, just above the flower, who glances knowingly our way. Given the satyr is often linked with flatulence in classical literature (Sophocles said they 'boasted of their farting power'), the interposition of one here is telling.

Bacchus appears frozen in mid-air, blasted from his seat - but is this the result of love or is there a more down-to-earth explanation? (Credit: National Gallery)

Once detected, a leitmotif of broken wind rumples the work's fabric and even begins to envelope the painting's leading lady herself. In the traditional interpretation of the story that Titian is telling, Ariadne, who has been watching the ship of the lover who abandoned her disappear, is taken by surprise by the arrival of Bacchus and his reprobate posse. Caught off-guard by Bacchus's beauty, so the story goes, she pivots clumsily to meet his gaze. But it is the inelegant backward fumble of Ariadne's left hand, which seems to have gathered a fistful of cheek in its awkward rotation, that suddenly waylays our eye. In the lewd light of the ripening trope of whiffiness, the upward waft of a twisting ribbon of fragrant rose fabric that rises from Ariadne's posterior is impossible to unsee. The gags are everywhere. Titian's painting is more than merely an elevated and exquisite mediation on the flex and fire of infatuation, it's a rude and rawdy whoopee-cushion for the eyes.

Am I alone in suspecting there may be as-yet undetected layers of sensory play in Titian's paintings - that they are indeed intended to engage each and every one our faculties? "When you look at Titian's paintings, he appeals to your sense of touch, especially, but also your sense of hearing and smell," says Matthias Wivel, Senior Curator at London's National Gallery, who has organised Titian: Love, Death, Desire, its current exhibition devoted to a series of six late works that the Venetian master created in the 1550s and 60s. "He's very keen on activating all your senses and it's just more immediate when it's visual than when you read it in Ovid, I think. But it's a very similar effect in that it activates our senses."
A prototype for his genius
Titian: Love, Death, Desire, summons a suite of canvases that the artist referred to as his 'poesie', for the lyrical quality he believed they shared with classical verse. The show offers a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see together in one place such masterworks as Danaë, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto, and The Rape of Europa. Not even Titian himself would have ever seen them all side-by-side. Bacchus and Ariadne, painted decades earlier when a young Titian was still establishing his reputation, is not a part of this display of mature achievement. But it hangs in a nearby gallery as part of the museum's permanent collection and shines a focused light on these later works as a kind of prototype for their intensity, ambition, and scale.

The painting's windy goings-on seem to continue to the leading lady Ariadne, whose clothes appear disturbed by a waft (Credit: National Gallery)

"Even though there are about 30 years separating them", Wivel says, describing the relationship between Bacchus and Ariadne and the half dozen mature paintings that comprise the show "a lot of what you see in the poesie is already there in Bacchus and Ariadne: the way he paints, the way he appeals to our senses, the way he uses tactility. When you see them next to each other your first reaction is to say that there is quite a big difference in how they're rendered. But when you get closer, you can see how absolutely logical that development is - how it's really it's a development of the same approach. It's not radically different. There's a natural evolution of his style."

Though Titian may not tuck a caper flower, with all its complexities of ambiguous aroma, into every one of his works, these later paintings repay close attention for their own overlooked details that enrich the tapestry of the stories they weave. "You notice all kinds of small things", Wivel says, of the advantage of having these canvases gathered together side-by-side, "how they form an overall thematic unit in a way. It's sort of obvious but it's not just that they're all stories from Ovid or they all deal with dramatic twists of fate and eroticism and so on. The way they become a meditation on nature for me has been very strong." This is "Titian at his best", Wivel says. What is it, exactly, that he feels Titian brings to the telling of Ovid that continues to resonate age after age? Again the analogy is to Shakespeare: "they're interested in many of the same things, because they're interested in emotion, " Wivel insists. "They're interested in the things that make us human - that we can't quite define or control."

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The hidden toilet humour in a Titian masterpiece

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You could easily miss it amid the romp and revelry that surrounds Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, as he leaps from his cheetah-drawn chariot after clapping eyes on the beautiful Ariadne: that tiny detail that transforms Titian's passionate painting of love-at-first-sight into something a little less fragrant.