Maybe I should watch one sometime; I also didn't know about Back to the Future until several years ago, which is well into my adulthood, yet when I did watch the trilogy I ended up loving it.
Strange, even in my third world country we got Kiki's Delivery Service by free TV (meaning no cable service) in special dates.
That's how I knew about them back in the mid 90's.
Even Chihiro aired in early 00's.
But they were aired at very late hours of the night, I'm talking about 11pm, 1am or 2am.
I was really into Cartoon Network and Boomerang as a child, from memory; occasionally Nickelodeon, and as a teen, Discovery Channel.
Ghibli films weren't on those channels, and it wasn't part of the North Epping zeitgeist - no-one mentioned them.
I don't think I ever saw an ad for Ghibli, in-cinemas, either. It just didn't exist for us at the time.
Even when I started watching YouTube, I was very much into LPs and =3 (RWJ) and stuff, so I never heard about Ghibli there.
Ponyo...what's that about?
TV Tropes says it's "very, very loosely based on The Little Mermaid" (the original Andersen story, not Disney's animated take) - huh.
There is no way to answer that with out a major spoiler, but is a very beautiful movie, the history is great, for me, the first time I see the movie was on the ICU recovering of a major surgery and was a big shock. I was unable to see the movie again until 2 years later, but well I was not on a very nice place.