On par with Kikujiro and A Summer at Grandpa's; the latter ostensibly a live-action precursor to Hayao Miyazaki's animated childhood through a looking glass. In theory, if we were to discard the spiritual/fantastical omnipresence in My Neighbor Totoro, what's left is pretty much an anime redux of Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1984 film, which accounts for a young boy and his pre-school sister's summer at their grandparent's rural home during their mother's recovery from illness. What Miyazaki does with innate ease is to impart the same experience – a swathe of mischief, curiosity, self-discovery and responsibility – with that most child-intrinsic of things: imagination.

For non-nostalgic purposes only, Evil managed to unearth a series of repressed personal anxieties; particularly those involving stunted adolescence and institutional terrorism. Not that I was ever taken to with a fist or the end of a cigarette stub, but traditionalist schools like the one I "embraced" have always fallen back on their own patriarchal law and outdated protocol, which in turn cultivates an oppressive student environment built on hierarchy, privilege and rightousness. If you've ever attended the type of educational regime in question here, you'll also know that the cycle is unbreakable – or at least at a base level, because school is a revolving door, and only once (or, if) you've graduated from the "Wonder Years", are you entitled (or required in macho-sadistic-pride terms) to make the lives of those beneath you a living hell.

In what is the most socially responsible gesture by a martial artist ever, San Te, having advanced through 35 grueling training levels of brute sadism and inventive torture (not to mention conquering the oh-so-deadly dining room water pit!), proposes to the temple abbot that it's about time Shaolin Kung Fu went mainstream. Tradition is a hard nut to crack, of course, so San Te embarks on his own revolutionary, for-the-peeps movement: to democratise martial arts and make it accessible to all. Grand egalitarianism on the one hand; filthy capitalist greed on the other.