But now, when I find my son laughing hysterically at weird Korean cartoons he’s unearthed in the furthest corners of Netflix – even though he’s too young to read the subtitles – I think, “That’s my boy”. Indeed, I’m still looking for that illusive castle in the clouds.

A Mr Jonathan Swift-ian tale of orphans and robots, proto-steampunk air pirates and flying islands (whoa!), the details are perhaps sketchy today, but the visual language and sense of adventure remain implanted in my brain. But when Castle In The Sky hovered into view, collective minds in the Merrett household (well, those under 10) were blown. Firm favourites saved on VHS tape included Hugo The Hippo, a psychedelic 1970s Hungarian feature financed by Fabergé’s (yes, that one) short-lived film production company, and Prince Nezha’s Triumph Against Dragon King, a 1979 Chinese effort that gained enough of a cult following outside of the family bungalow to warrant its own Google Doodle in 2014.

This didn’t stop me scouring the schedules and sniffing out fringe animations from other countries that, despite having a massive impact on their respective domestic markets, would hardly register a blip on the radar of the English south coast’s uniformly dull suburban cultural desert. If you missed something, in the ephemeral world of broadcasting, it was gone forever. In fact, there were but four channels, all with a curfew, and the latter of these had only just been launched. There was none of this Netflix when I were a lad. If you’re going through a quarter-life crisis (or really, just a constantly ongoing one), I can’t recommend anything more. Outwardly, it’s a quieter film than much of Studio Ghibli’s oeuvre the magic here doesn’t come from spirits or anthropomorphised animals, but instead from the childhood memories and demons that shape our decisions in both career and love as we move through life. Directed by Mr Miyazaki’s collaborator and Ghibli co-founder, the late Mr Isao Takahata, Only Yesterday was released in 1991 and tells the story of a young woman working in a Tokyo office who visits the Yamagata countryside and has to make the choice between staying there or returning to her life in the city. It was a few years later, though, that I saw Only Yesterday. The colours! The music! The Radish Spirit! I promptly devoured as much of Mr Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpieces as though I was No-Face set loose in Yubaba’s bath house. I must have been barely a teenager when my dad came home one day with a copy of Spirited Away from Blockbuster (god, Blockbuster!) – I remember watching it and feeling like it was absolutely the best thing I’d ever seen in my tiny little life.

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