I took two of my best friends to see Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, The Wind Rises, at the cinema. One walked out half way through; the other reminds me on multiple occasions of what a dubious evening of entertainment he felt obliged to endure.

Even multi-award winning films can’t be to everyone’s taste, but my friends’ reactions seem indicative of a wider level of disconnect between English-speaking audiences and foreign films, especially when it comes to animation; Japanese animation, in particular. It is my experience that many Western viewers aren’t willing to give anime a chance and some, still more frustratingly, remain unwilling to embrace the medium even when they’re sat in front of one of its most fantastic products. It’s as if they’ve got their eyes closed.

I admit, the word ‘anime’ can conjure up negative stereotypes. To enjoy anime or manga at my secondary school was to align yourself with a rather unpopular group who had been nicknamed ‘the cool club’ with a cruel irony and who were viewed by many with unfriendly suspicion.

One of the main reasons for which they were teased was the (ungrounded) assumption that liking anime meant liking hentai, the West’s word for the very large body of pornographic animation that’s produced in Japan. There’s even a lot of anime aimed at children (including many of programmes that, growing up, you might have seen on CITV) which seem to be unduly sexualised. The Yu-Gi-Oh! series, for example, featured enormous-breasted and short-skirted women aplenty, the like of which you would be seriously unlikely to find in Arthur or Scooby Doo. But, most of all, I think this negativity was simply an aversion to anime’s otherness, an aversion to anything which did not toe the line of mainstream Western animation.

If pornographic anime tells us anything, it is that in Japan animation is for adults too; adult audiences are taken seriously in the medium as a whole, resulting in some very moving, complex and not-at-all pornographic films. Indeed, the body of Japanese animation is a vast one, and we are lucky that the cream of the crop, such as the films of Studio Ghibli, are available in English.

It is with some embarrassment and disappointment that, I admit, my exposure to good, non-Western animation pretty much begins and ends with Studio Ghibli. But many of their films are very good and some are astounding. The crap that you might have seen on CITV is not indicative of the potential of anime as an art form, and we should not be closed to it just because some of its derivatives are uncomfortably sexualised or otherwise unengaging.

The same year (2013) that Disney’s Frozen won forty accolades, Studio Ghibli’s The Wind Rises accrued seventeen awards – an impressive haul, especially given the steep competition and the English-speaking bent of most of the awarding bodies. And it’s not just Japan where animation is pushed to engage our emotions and appeal to adults as well as children. This year, we might look to South Africa where the animated film Kariba is being made; the concept art looks stunning and the plot seems promising.

By and large, however, Western audiences seem unwilling to explore animated films beyond the same three staple sources: the Hollywood behemoths Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks. I know, I know, Pixar consistently produces excellent films and their latest offering, Inside Out, is probably set to be a classic, but just because some great films are made in the West, we shouldn’t close our eyes to great films made elsewhere, animated or not.

We ought to seek out foreign animation with a more open mind and a greater readiness to engage our emotions than we currently do. Unfamiliarity is a poor excuse for condemning a film as artistically void, and reflects more on the audience than on the art.