Interest
Anime in Sight & Sound Magazine Film Polls
posted on by Andrew Osmond
The new issue of the British film magazine Sight and Sound (September 2012 cover date) includes the results of its "Best Film" poll, which has been held every ten years since 1952. The poll is based on the votes of 846 film directors, reviewers and other specialists.
While no anime (and indeed, no animated film) broke the main Top 100 films (the top 50 are listed on the BFI website), anime did figure in three of the sub-polls listed in the magazine.
My Neighbor Totoro was ranked the eighth best Japanese film, one place under Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru.
Totoro was also ranked joint tenth best film of the 1980s, alongside films including The Shining and One Upon a Time in America.
Spirited Away was ranked joint eighth in films made in 2000 and after, alongside such films as Wall-E, There Will Be Blood and Russian Ark.
The highest ranked live-action Japanese film was Yasujiro Ozu's family drama Tokyo Story (1953), which was ranked the third greatest film overall. Ozu was also ranked as the fourth greatest film director, behind (in reverse order) Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Goddard and Alfred Hitchcock.
Citizen Kane by Orson Welles had been ranked the greatest film ever in the previous five Sight and Sound polls, from 1962 to 2002. This year, however, Kane has fallen to second place, behind the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock psychological thriller, Vertigo.
