Five Animated Movies That Grow Up With You

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.Any movie can be a time capsule, but the fantastical nature of animated movies makes them particularly ripe for nostalgia. Revisiting them can be a reminder that although we may grow up, we don’t have to grow out of certain comforts. Here are five recommendations from The Atlantic’s writers and editors for animated movies that have stuck with them long after the first watch.Kiki’s Delivery Service (streaming on HBO Max)My parents would reject the notion that they were tastemakers, but they often did an excellent job at identifying quality children’s cinema. Or perhaps they were just taken with the back-of-the-box description of Kiki’s Delivery Service, a VHS tape of which they brought home when I was still too young to tie my own shoes.The Studio Ghibli film, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, stands in contrast to the Disney princess movies that captivated my fellow preschoolers in the mid-’90s. Unlike the glamorous Ariel and Belle, Kiki is a short-haired teen witch who wears a shapeless dress; she embarks on a journey of self-discovery with nothing but a broomstick and a chatty black cat. As a child, I found her determination to prove herself worthy of her magical gifts appealing, but Kiki’s anxiety about failing at this task was what resonated with me most. (I was known all over town as an incredibly anxious kid.) A scene in which she experiences some serious ego death and, in response, plops face down on her bed is still the best portrait of a depressive episode I’ve ever experienced. Of Miyazaki’s many coming-of-age stories about girlhood, Kiki’s Delivery Service has always been my favorite; it’s a masterpiece of storytelling that feels at once intimate and grand, and is affecting at any age.— Allegra Frank, senior editor***