Ooooohhohohohho, thank you for asking this most intriguing of questins! :D I've long given up on picking just one. I think with Miyazaki's work being so varied and so deep, my resonance with each of them has changed over time. Not to mention that the world has changed a lot since these films were made and I myself have gone through many different layers of understanding who I am as the decades have gone by. As I write this I've watching these films for 25 years, and many films have grown in my eyes, Spirited Away and Howl being two which I didn't connect to that deeply twenty years ago but I feel much more connection to them now. If I had to choose the one scene that has had the most impact on me, that would be Totoro's culmination in the tree rebirth ceremony (that I talk about in my Totoro video) that gained more and more layers as time went on. But the film which has gone through the most transformation in my experience of it has to be Nausicaä. When I first saw Nausicaä as a teenager, it was a beautifully drawn adventure film for me, the art and the music and the story was calling out to me but I did not yet know what to do with it. In my twenties, as I studied Campbell, Jung, Buddhism and Shinto, I started to grasp how deep the folklore and mythology of it is and started to look at the film as Nausicaä looks up at how deep and tall the crystallised forest is. Later I started to connect deeply with the film's therapeutic theme on the loss of 'mother' (symbolically and in real terms), and the related theme of having to work through childhood trauma through self-reliance. And when I did a big podcast special about the film at the end of the last decade it started feeling almost prophetic with how the world was going. And then 2020 happened, and the changes from that have yet to settle for me to be able to re-evaluate what Nausicaä says to me now. Hope that answers your question :)

@@followthemoonrabbit thank you very much for your reply! It was deep and thorough, just like your reviews. As for me my favourite studio Ghibli film is and will always be Porco Rosso. It's the most underrated Ghibli movie in my opinion. Unlike the other ones is far simpler, lighthearted and doesn't contain profound themes of environmentalism or capitalism, but it has grown to me the most probably because I share those qualities as well as a person XD The other films call out to me in the same way they did with you but without all those reviews to draw upon I would be lost. Nausicaa is my second favourite Ghibli film and yes it was damn right prophetic. Perhaps Miyazaki is a prophet among the mangakas lol 🤭 I love Miyazaki's films so much cuz I strongly share his notions with regards to respecting the nature and I too despise war. I wanted to say thank you for your reviews and also congratulate you about them! Keep up the great work 💪

Thank you for your comment! This is exactly why I do these talks. :)

The first is Laputa: Castle in the Sky -- in the mines, Pazu and Sheeta split a fried egg on a piece of bread. The second fried egg is in Howl's breakfast and the third fried egg is in the absolutely delicious looking ramen that Sosuke's mother Lisa makes in Ponyo. I don't know of other fried eggs in Miyazaki films so I've jokingly named them the Miyazaki Egg Trilogy. And if you watch all three of the scenes together, the effect is that you'll probably want to eat fried eggs. :)

@@followthemoonrabbit thanxx

I know right? I'm always surprised how little traction Kiki gets next to the Big Three (Howl, Mononoke and Totoro).

@@followthemoonrabbit I meant your video deserves more views. But yes, Kiki is underrated. I think it’s because the English dubbed version is that much worse than the subtitled original. I just saw it in theaters again and was reminded of how much better the voice acting is, how much the dialogue was changed and how much better the pacing is with certain scenes being lengthened for a few seconds at a time.

@@ghiblinerd6196 Oh, thank you, that's very kind. It is true though so far that the view rate of the videos on my channel roughly correspond to the relative popularity of each film in the English speaking regions that I know of. That said, it's a great point you make about how the popularity of the films also correspond to the quality of their dubs, and most English language viewers will watch these films dubbed -- not unsurprising as most people under 10 will not prefer original language with subtitles :). And Kiki's dubbing is especially problematic both with the tonal changes and the re-edits. I mean it never ceases to baffle me what audacity they must have had to take a finished film meticulously edited to perfection and cut out bits here and there for arbitrary reasons...

@@followthemoonrabbit all it takes is holding the camera on kikis introspective face for an extra two or three seconds to let the viewer know that she’s grappling with internal conflict and not just being an annoying angsty teen, and as much as I like Phil Hartman, hearing his deep voice coming out of a tiny cute cat is oddly out of place. When they got Andy richter to play the kings assistant in The Cat Returns, that was an odd choice too but at least he tried to pitch up his voice to sound more diminutive like the original (Japanese) female voice actor

That's exactly how I taught these films in the first 5-6 years before I met Dr. Shiraishi who I quote in this video as well as the Totoro one. Obviously I can't personally speak to what the Japanese countryside looked like in the 1950s (for the two reasons that I wasn't there at the time and also I wasn't born yet). So I saw these films also as a death and rebirth of Japanese society during and after the war. However, my view on the landscape of Totoro changed fundamentally when she told me that realised Totoro is a fantasy film not when the magical creatures arrived, but much earlier when the children arrived in the very beginning of the film, with plentiful rice fields where in reality there was still famine and not nearly enough rice to go around. The healthy state of the rice fields alone signalled fantasy to her, a world that could have been instead of the world that was -- that stuck with me ever since. And I guess this is one element that you can only really notice if you studied that time period extensively or you actually grew up there.

Exactly! It's one of those "you cannot unsee it" moments. And I'd know, I had seen the film at least 35 times before I learned this about it, and never made the connection.

Ahahahaha... well. They're certainly not a superhero team voluntarily coming together in a time of crisis -- but they're also not a group of rugged detectives forced to team up by their captain when they just want to work alone. :D They end up together in a much more organic way, over time, and they really only become a "group" by the end. I'd characterise their early reaction to each other to be close to "bemused neutral" more than anything else, especially when Howl first meets Sophie in the house. "Oh, you're here, well, that's weird, but okay, let's have breakfast." A good Japanese example of a story of people that don't want to group up but do it anyway would be Cowboy Bebop. Or Evangelion. :D

Wow, thank you! <3

Same, it was fantastic!