Editor's Note: Each week Joe Leydon explores quirky and interesting movies outside of the mainstream multiplex in a column called "Mondo Cinema." This is his debut column.

You’ll believe a pig can fly.

Yes, ladies and gents, you’ll accept unquestioningly that a World War I flying ace has been transformed into a porcine bounty hunter, and patrols the Adriatic during the 1930s to battle airborne pirates for fun and profit, in Porco Rosso, the classic 1992 anime directed by master animator Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle).

The movie, set to screen at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a delightful fable suitable for audiences of all ages, a pastel-colored fantasia that plays like an inspired mash-up of Howard Hawksian adventure (complete with males who define themselves through their professionalism, and women smarter and feistier than any guys they encounter) and Casablanca-style romanticism.

After being transformed into a swaggering man-size swine after a bizarre wartime episode – an event Miyazaki renders relatively late in the film during a surprisingly poignant and potently lyrical flashback – an Italian air force fighter pilot assumes the name Porco Rosso (“Red Pig”) and commits himself to a career of free-lance derring-do.

When he loses a dogfight to a preening American flyboy who wants to become a movie star – and then, no kidding, US president – Porco needs the expertise of a spunky 17-year old girl mechanic, and the sweet inspiration of a sexy chanteuse once married to one of his fallen comrades, to get back in the clouds with a vengeance.

Neither of his allies wants Porco to take part in a high-stakes, highly visible rematch with the flyboy, and not just because it will attract the attention of authorities who’ve been hunting him since he went AWOL from the air force. (“Better a pig than a fascist,” Porco says by way of explaining his desertion, one of the movie’s many pointed allusions to between-the-wars Italian politics.) Both women really care for the guy, and would prefer that he fly out of harm’s way.

But, hey, a pig’s got to do what a pig’s got to do.

Porco Rosso will be shown in Japanese with English subtitles at MFAH as part of Castles in the Sky: Studio Ghibli, an ongoing retrospective of works from the storied film studio. Also on tap at the museum this weekend: Tomomi Mochizuki’s The Ocean Waves (6:30 p.m. Friday, 4 p.m. Sunday), a 1993 Studio Ghibli anime about discontented teens in a coastal town; and Josef Astor’s Lost Bohemia (6 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday), an acclaimed 2010 documentary about the eviction of artists from their Carnegie Hall apartments.

Anti-Obama film continues

Despite receiving a conspicuous lack of mainstream media coverage, 2016: Obama’s America continues to attract ticketbuyers here in H-Town. Indeed, the aggressively provocative documentary – a slickly packaged critique of You Know Who – has been playing here since July 13, and continues this weekend (and, who knows, maybe for another month as well) at the AMC Gulf Pointe and First Colony theaters, the Edwards Marq*E megaplex, the Cinemark at Market Street in the Woodlands and the Santikos Silverado complex in Tomball.

As I noted in my fair and balanced Variety review, 2016 is conservative author and political commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s attempt to distill and expand upon the theories, investigations and accusations in his best-selling book The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

Strictly speaking, it’s not an anything-goes hatchet job – for one thing, D’Souza (who serves as co-director, co-scriptwriter and on-camera interviewer/commentator) avoids birther imbecility – but while making the case against re-electing its subject, it’s about an objective as one of Michael Moore’s cinematic screeds.

(Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, you understand.)

Basically, the film employs a brisk montage of snappy visuals, re-enactments, talking-head interviews and first-person commentary to render President Barack Obama as a clear and present danger whose socialist governing philosophy has been indelibly colored by radical influences ranging from his African-born father (a rabid anti-colonialist) to the notorious Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

It’s doubtful that anyone who voted for Obama in 2008 would be won over by D’Souza’s warning that, in the wake of a second Obama term, America would be a mere shadow of its formerly great self. Still, there’s no gainsaying the value of 2016 as a sort of Cliffs Notes précis of the conservative case against the re-election of our current US president (whose second term, it should be noted, actually would end in January 2017).

They exhort. You decide.

Sundance gems and Bollywood erotic thriller

Opening elsewhere this weekend: The well-reviewed Searching for Sugar Man and the Oscar-nominated A Cat in Paris, both at the Sundance Cinemas.

And there’s actually a Bollywood erotic thriller titled Jism 2 – OK, wipe that smirk off your face – continuing at the AMC Studio 30. To answer the inevitable question: No, I didn’t know there had been a Jism 1, either.