In 1988, the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli released two tonally opposite films at the same time. One was Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro, an inviting children’s fantasy. The other, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, was an unflinching portrait of two children left orphaned by WWII. The studio’s belief in animation was clear: that within the artform, there are no limits; not to its stories, nor how they are told.

But 40 years later, in a mainstream landscape that lumps animated films into the category of children’s entertainment, Ghibli and its uncompromising hand-drawn visions look light on contemporaries. The average UK cinema-goer is left to draw the conclusion that the studio stands alone in its commitment to the limitless possibilities of animation.

In 2018, Michael Leader started recording a deep-dive on the studio via the Ghibliotheque podcast, which he hosts alongside Jake Cunningham. Seven years later, with two books out on the subject and a third on the way, Leader finds himself well versed in the rich world beyond the studio and a professional advocate for animation in a country underexposed to its vast expanse. Now, via a year-long film season at the Barbican, titled Animation at War, he shows that Studio Ghibli are not in fact, and have never been, outliers.