Since their foundation back in 1985, Studio Ghibli have risen to become the biggest and best known animated film studio outside of America, earning the only Oscar for Best Animated Feature to be awarded to a film developed outside of English-speaking parts of the world.

As you can imagine, we here at HeyUGuys are big fans of their work, and love this news from TwitchFilm that its co-founders, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, are each planning a new directorial project.

Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky was the first Ghibli film to be released back in the summer of 1986, and Takahata and Miyazaki then followed this up with the joint release, on the same day in the spring of 1988, of two of their best loved classics, Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro, directed by each respectively.

Over the years since then, both have made a number of fantastic films that have found both critical and commercial success across the world, which is not the easiest thing to do for films produced outside of the English-speaking parts of the world at all. It was Miyazaki’s Spirited Away that won an Oscar in 2002, and became the highest-grossing film in Japanese cinema history, earning more than a quarter of a billion dollars (or, to put a different spin on it and make it sound even more impressive, more than twenty-seven billion yen).

Miyazaki’s last two films, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo, have both been very successful too, and a new project from him is always something to look forward to. The details on his new project are still being kept under wraps, but we do know that it’s being described as an autobiography, though whether it is his or someone else’s is not yet known.

More information is available on Takahata’s new project. The project will be his first Ghibli film since 1999’s My Neighbours The Yamadas, and just like Miyazaki’s next film, this is certainly something to look forward to. His new film is said to be based on the tale of the bamboo cutter, the traditional Japanese 10th Century story of a princess who was discovered as a baby inside the stalk of a bamboo plant.

It’s still unknown when we can expect either of these projects to be released, and it’s quite likely that we’ll have to wait a good few years before seeing either of them at the cinema. But it’s always going to be good news hearing of a new Studio Ghibli film being in the pipeline, and even more so when it’s not one but two new Ghibli films. And the awesomeness is even further compounded by the fact that they’ll be directed by the studio’s co-founders. It’s almost too much Ghibli awesomeness to take. But that, of course, isn’t possible.

And for the pure and simple love of the films, I thought it would be nice to add a few pictures from some of my favourite moments from the ones I’ve seen, just because they’re so damn brilliant. Enjoy!

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Since graduating, I spend as much time as possible watching films/TV shows, reading books, and listening to music. So getting to write about what I love is nothing short of awesome. Biggest film-related hope for 2014/ever: Guy Ritchie announcing the RocknRolla sequel is finally moving forward.