While checking some links for my post on Peter S. Beagle, I found an interesting factoid. The folks who created the Rankin-Bass animated films like the Last Unicorn, the Hobbitt, and Lord of the Rings went on the create Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind and to become Studio Ghibli.
From a page of info I found on this:
…The publishers decided that Nausicaa was popular enough to make an animated feature based on the story in the manga with its creator, Hayao Miyazaki, as the director. They hired the studio Topcraft to do the animation. While Topcraft had done several high quality animated features before this, (most notably The Hobbit), all of them had been for Rankin-Bass Productions and released only in the US market. Their work was unknown in Japan itself….
I am a fan of the Rankin-Bass movies that they produced as well as the Studio Ghibli films like Nausicaa, Kiki’s delivery service, Spirited Away, and Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
