Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #123: Princess Mononoke (1997).

In late-Muromachi-era Japan, new medieval technology rises against the natural powers found in the kindly Great God of the Forest and the ecological spirits he protects. When a strange demon arrives and threatens the Emishi clan, one of its young warriors, Prince Ashitaka (voiced by Billy Crudup in the English dubbed version), kills the creature but then discovers that human anger mutates it.Now infected with its dangerous curse, Ashitaka leaves home for the western forests to find the cure that will save him. Once there Ashitaka becomes embroiled in a bitter conflict between Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver in the EDV), the forest-clearing leader of Irontown with many human followers, and San aka Princess Mononoke (Claire Danes; you get it by now), a young woman raised by wolves who hates humans but gradually sympathises with Ashitaka.

Pixar co-founder John Lasseter has called Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke's writer-director and the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, the world's greatest living animator, and that may be true. This was the film that put Miyazaki and Ghibli on the international cinematic map before they broke through with 2001's Spirited Away, and while that was the first non-American movie to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, for me this is definitely Miyazaki's crowning glory (although Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988) tops 'em both for me). It's his longest and most mature and complex work, serving as a meditation on war and particularly humanity's relationship with nature. Miyazaki first hatched his concept for it in the late 1970s with several drawings, but shelved it until 1994 when he began writing the screenplay. That was a wise choice, as the then-53-year-old Miyazaki could bring a more restrained and delicate but no less sincere touch to this very political fantasy allegory than a younger filmmaker/animator probably would have. As you'd expect, too, the animation is strikingly beautiful and detailed right down to the forest's foliage, and Miyazaki tells the central story (in which he invokes the seminal Western genre director John Ford) very calmly and objectively. The vocal performances (in both the Japanese and English dubbed versions) also help strongly to draw us into this community very far-removed from our own, and Joe Hisaishi's music effectively marries the rural and natural settings and atmospheres. Princess Mononoke is a superbly epic, thrilling and thought-provoking treatise on existence, adventure, power and the natural world.

And one priceless tidbit to close with: when the now-disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein tried to distribute Princess Mononoke through his company Miramax, he intended to make several edits to it beforehand. When Miyazaki learned of this, he sent Weinstein a package containing a gleaming katana sword with a note attached that read: "No cuts." His films have been released in the US unedited ever since.

One genre I FOLKing love.

Ever since my teens, my favourite music genre has been hard/classic rock: the Beatles, the Stones, AC/DC, KISS, Queen, you get it. There's just nothing more infectious and soothing than those fist-in-the-air tunes for me. But as I've grown into adulthood (more or less), I've also developed a keen taste for a style which could be the alter ego of that: folk rock.  I must immediately admit, though, than I'm not an overall fan of the most celebrated folk artist, Bob Dylan; I know the status he occupies in pop culture but I just can't stop finding his voice off-putting. Anyway, with this entry I want to give appreciations of the four artists most responsible for my love of folk, and I should probably start with the one whose work I've loved the longest.

Now, look, I know just how polarising James Blunt has always been but honestly, I will never understand why. When I first heard his debut single You're Beautiful, I was 17 and it spoke to me on every level; I'd experienced unrequited love like that more times than I care remember. Then when I bought the album Back to Bedlam, I must've driven my parents absolutely mental with it from having it on repeat for about a year. His lyrics are sparse but totally articulate and lucid, filled with unique similes and haunting imagery and he jumps between guitar and piano with confident assurance, but best of all, his voice sounds somehow neither male nor female, which I think gives it a universal resonance. After BTB, he lost his way somewhat with his next two albums All the Lost Souls and Some Kind of Trouble, but with his latest two, Moon Landing and The Afterlove, he has really return to form.

Thanks to my parents I'd heard Cat Stevens' music periodically as a kid, but I must confess it wasn't until Father and Son was used unforgettably in the 2009 movie The Boat That Rocked that, at 20, I truly became a fan myself. I bought a stack of his back catalogue pretty soon after that, and in 2010 I then saw him in concert, which was a fucking magical show. He had his big break aged just 18, but then really came into his own throughout the 1970s as a twenty-something with a more conscientious outlook and agenda, and his songs from that period contain messages and themes that are perhaps more relevant now than ever. He also did all his own artwork. After he famously converted to Islam and abandoned the spotlight in 1978 , he returned to music after nearly 30 years with the albums An Other Cup and Roadsinger which showed he'd lost none of his talent, and while he made controversial comments about author Salman Rushdie in 1989 after Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses landed him a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini, in 2001 Yusuf Islam as he's known now made a long and emotional statement condemning the 9/11 attacks.

Like most Millennials, I first heard of Joni Mitchell through Counting Crows' hit 2003 cover of Big Yellow Taxi. Then I'd known of her seminal 1971 album Blue for some years before I finally heard it at work last year and was instantly captivated. Soon after I bought it and then two of its predecessors, Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon. Another painter like the Cat, Mitchell approaches songwriting like it's a self-portrait or still life: she doesn't use big or fancy words, but uses more words to give the settings of her songs real atmosphere, and a very conversational and introspective quality. When she's in an up-tempo mood Joni is fun and lilting, when she's in balladeer mood you see the vulnerable little girl underneath, and the rest of the time she just makes you feel like you're having a campfire singalong. A rare kind of triple threat.

The Boss. I've put him last not because I like him the least, but because he's the least associated with folk out of these four (and as you might've gleaned from my intro I do love him primarily as a hard rocker). Bruce had dabbled occasionally in folk during the 1970s and '80s with tracks like Atlantic City, I'm on Fire and My Hometown, but then entering the '90s he focused pretty exclusively on it. In 1996 after releasing his fully acoustic album The Ghost of Tom Joad he even said: "The bottom line is that, through the nineties, the voice I've found, the voice that's felt the most present and vital for me, had basically been the folk voice. It really hasn't been my rock voice." Smart choice. It was his folk voice that helped him win an Oscar for Streets of Philadelphia, his theme to the 1993 movie Philadelphia, a nomination for another one for Dead Man Walkin' from the 1995 movie of the same name and with which he sang one of his sweetest masterpieces, Secret Garden.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #122: Satellite Boy (2012).

Pete (Cameron Wallaby) is 12 and inhabits an derelict and otherwise disused drive-in cinema under a satellite in the Kimberleys with his grandfather Jagamurra (David Gulpilil), whom he calls "Jubi" and learns the ways of the Outback and Aboriginal traditions from. He wishes to open a restaurant there and hopes his absent mother (Rohanna Angus) will return to help him with that, but Jubi doubts she will return. Now a local mining company arrives to set up shop there, so Pete hatches a plan. He enlists his friend Kalmain (Joseph Pedley) to take a weekend-long bike trip with him to the big smoke to meet with the company's officials about this; being a fugitive from the cops, Kalmain agrees. But naturally, once the pair lose their bearings, the trip becomes a walkabout. Now Pete must count on his granddad's sage teachings to complete the journey and appeal to the company along with finding his mother, who wants to move with him to Perth and become a beautician.

Debut writer-director Catriona McKenzie, a member of the Kurai Gurnai Nation, discovered and fell in love with Western Australia's Kimberley Region while filming the TV series The Circuit there. That inspired her to tell a story set in the Outback, and Satellite Boy later became the first feature to be shot on location in the World Heritage-listed Purnunulu National Park and its Bungle Bungle Range. And what a worthy first such feature it became. It's very relaxed and gentle, but this is because McKenzie is more interested in studying Indigenous Australian traditions like Aboriginal mythology, philosophy and the rite-of-passage which a walkabout is, than she is in making a political statement with the mining company plot device. By treating that element neutrally, McKenzie instead offers a more family-friendly yet no less wise and tender tale of modern Aboriginal youth than something like Samson and Delilah (2009), and complimenting her beautiful direction are David Bridie's score and particularly Geoffrey Simpson's vibrant cinematography.

McKenzie's instincts also proved spot-on with her casting of the two young leads Wallaby and Pedley, but perhaps inevitably, Indigenous Aussie screen icon Gulpilil shows them how it's done the whole way. Satellite Boy is a unique, heartfelt, evocative and enjoyably innocent contribution to Australia's Indigenous screen history.