As a gentle tribute to one great animation director who has been one of the key leading figure in Studio Ghibli, Japanese documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” has a bittersweet quality considering the uncertain future of Studio Ghibli at present. While it is entertaining to watch how the people in Ghibli Studio work on the various levels of production before their completed work is finally shown to the audiences, we are reminded that this may be the last chapter of its era, and that gives a sad, elegiac quality to the documentary.

With the courteous narration by the director/writer Mami Sunada, “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” looks inside Studio Ghibli in the middle of its simultaneous production of two animation films around late 2012. They were “The Wind Rises” (2013) and “The Tale of Princess Kaguya” (2013), and the documentary mainly focuses on the production process of “The…