Original title: Hôhokekyo tonari no Yamada-kun

The title may recall Tonari no Totoro/My Neighbour Totoro (1988) but as far as tradition goes, that’s it for this very strange offering from Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata. Coming hot on the heels of Hayao Miyazaki’s epic fantasy Mononoke-hime/Princess Mononoke (1997), this small-scale family sitcom couldn’t have been more different in both content, style and intention. Though it has occasional bursts of wild fantasy, it is, like much of Takahata’s work, a more down-to-earth film, a series of often very funny, sometimes very moving vignettes about the Yamada family, a charming clan whose everyday foibles, dreams and interactions are lovingly observed.

The eccentric Yamadas (“I’ve never seen such an odd family before” sighs a shop worker they have a run-in with) are parents Takashi (Touru Masuoka in the original version, James Belushi in the English dub) and Matsuko (Yukiji Asaoka/Molly Shannon), Matsuko’s mother Shige (Masako Araki/Tress MacNeille), teenage son Noboru (Hayato Isobata/Daryl Sabara), five-year-old Nonoko (Naomi Uno/Liliana Mumy) and pet dog Pochi. There’s no story as such, just a series of sketches following the family going through their daily lives. One might be reminded of those television adaptations of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons that featured similar only vaguely connected anecdotes with an added dash of surrealism.

The structure alone would have marked My Neighbours the Yamadas as the most atypical of Ghibli films (there are no “magical girls”, no ecological messages, few flights of pure fancy) but it’s the look that most knocks you for six on first viewing. Ghibli’s house style had developed into a lush, richly detailed form of animation that boggled the mind with its extraordinary attention to detail. Based on a comic strip (yonkoma manga in Japanese) by Hisaichi Ishii that ran in Asahi Shimbun newspaper since 1991. In keeping with its roots, My Neighbours the Yamadas has a simpler, stripped down style that perfectly mimics the feel of the strip, rendered in a gorgeous digital “watercolour” look.

It was the first of Ghibli’s films to be entirely digital in execution (CGI had been used in sparingly in Princess Mononoke) though you’d never know it to look at it. It may look very different to every other Ghibli film but it lacks the coldness that blights most purely CGI films, largely because Takahata takes time to invest in the characters – the family dynamic feels very real, instantly identifiable and the situations are often very charming. The moment when Nonoko meets another lost child, Toshio, and they come to believe that it’s the adults who are lost and not them is particularly funny, while the scene of Shige visiting a terminally ill friend in hospital is simply heart-breaking.

It’s a more interesting experiment than Umi ga Kikoeru/Ocean Waves (1993), in which Ghibli turned over production to a younger generation of film-makers with mixed results. But does it work? Not entirely. At 104 minutes, it’s far too long for such a slender premise though it’s not without considerable charm. One suspects that some nuances were lost on non-Japanese audiences (the relevance of the haiku and extracts from Japanese poetry voiced by Kosanji Yanagiya/David Ogden Stiers in particular seem like a strange affectation in the English dub) and jokes that will have hit their intended target in Japan will likely fall flat to those not intimately versed in the minutiae of Japanese domestic life.

But when it gets it right, and that’s more often than not, My Neighbours the Yamadas is a fascinating and often very funny break from the norm. It was a measure of just how confident the seemingly unstoppable Ghibli had become by the end of the Millennium that they were even willing to contemplate such an unusual experiment. Sadly, the film didn’t perform as well at the box office as the studio’s other films. After the extraordinary Princess Mononoke, audiences were perhaps expecting more of the same and the smaller-scale, more intimate Yamadas was not what they were expecting, despite it containing some of Takahata’s most gloriously affecting moments – the wild finale, in which the family perform a karaoke version of Que Sera Sera and literally soar across the city on umbrellas is a moment that sits right up there with the very best that Ghibli ever produced.

Ghibli went back to more familiar ground with their next film, Hayao Miyazaki’s more traditional (for Ghibli at least) but no less extraordinary Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi/Spirited Away (2001) and Takahata, never the most prolific of directors, would wait another fourteen years before making another film, his last, the gorgeous Kaguya-hime no Monogatari/The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013).