Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I followed the link, and I'm impressed! Except for a music vid or two, you'll have just about everything associated with Studio Ghibli and/or Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata pre-Ghibli! However, I ordered some DVD's in Japanese and Chinese with English subtitles that were supposed to play in any zone, and only one of the two discs would play on my machine at all, and the English subtitled version of "Laputa" tended to skip around without warning. I suspect you're dealing with a classier supplier than my Singapore source, though, so hopefully you'll get good quality and fully-subtitled versions of the films.

Aside from my unfortunate Singapore mail-order purchases, I have some of Miyazaki's earliest works dubbed in English ("Panda! Go Panda!", a couple of "Sherlock Hound" tales, as well as "Castle of Cagliostro" and the butchered and much-edited English dub of "Nausicaa" from the 1980's sold under the title "Warriors of the Wind"), but I've not gotten into Isao Takahata's works ("Grave of the Fireflies", etc.), simply because his work seems so much darker in subject matter, however beautifully and truthfully rendered.

I go along with Helen McCarthy's argument (in her book HAYAO MIYAZAKI: MASTER OF JAPANESE ANIMATION) that in "Cagliostro", even though Miyazaki is working within someone else's universe and with someone else's characters, many of the themes and motifs characteristic of his later films can already be seen -- and it's just fun, anyway!

I've seen on borrowed VHS tapes the Japanese versions (without subtitles of any kind to clue me in!) of "Nausicaa", "Laputa: the Castle in the Sky", "Porco Rosso", and "Princess Mononoke", and I currently own on VHS and/or DVD the English-dubbed versions of "My Neighbor Totoro," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "Castle in the Sky", "Princess Mononoke", and "Spirited Away", as well as the widescreen Japanese version (with English subtitles) of "Kiki" for good measure.

I've already ordered my copy of the new DVD of "Nausicaa" due to be released on Aug. 31, and I'm planning to do the same for "Porco Rosso". I may even spring for the new two-disc version of "Totoro" being released on Aug. 31, as well, unless my frugal Scots-Irish blood balks at such a purchase when I don't have the excuse of current research/writing on anime to justify it!

However, with 17 DVD's, you'll still have me beat!