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Pretty sure it's just for funsies.

An interesting thing to talk about in an interview, for sure.

Exactly what I thought, if it's free can you just give me a dump of your tables? (maybe they are available somewhere else already?)

Because Studio Ghibli continues to make films. So you don't have to 1) know when a new film is released 2) download a new data dump.

1) That's what the If-Modified-Since header is for.

2) It's a bunch of text data; as the link posted in another comment shows, it's less than 50kB uncompressed.