What makes

Studio Ghibli so magically immersive?

Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation powerhouse, has cast its spell over wide-eyed anime
audiences across four decades. This month, Hayao Miyazaki announced he would put his
retirement plans on hold to grant us his final, fantastical animation, Boro the Caterpillar, once
again pulling us back into the colourful world populated by Totoro, Ponyo, Kiki and Chihiro.

“Their emotions will become yours,” Miyazaki once said, but what exactly is it that makes the
Ghibli oeuvre so visually arresting, magnetic and enjoyable across age brackets and
hemispheres? A visual essay by Asher Isbrucker, “The Immersive Reality of Studio Ghibli”,
seeks to explore this. As Indiewire reports, Isbrucker illustrates that the animation house’s major
asset is their “immersive realism”.

Although parents being turned into pigs (Spirited Away), warrior princesses raised by wolves
(Princess Mononoke) and fighter-pilot pigs (Porco Rosso) may not be the pinnacle of what we
think of as ‘realism’, it’s the animator’s ability to create in-depth magical narratives that feel real
because of their detail and fervour. This is what Isburcker refers to as ‘world-building’ – we
suspend our belief and buy into the world of Ghibli when even the most imaginative aspects
become immersive and grounded.

Striking a balance between fantasy and reality is difficult, and something major animators aside
from Ghibli strive to create. “Every visual element in the film must be created from scratch,
there’s nothing there before it’s drawn. This is where Ghibli excels,” says Ishbrucker. “Their
animators demonstrate a mastery of technique and attention to detail with every single scene, to
really bring the world of the storyteller’s mind to life.” So, no matter how far-fetched the story, the
world of a Ghibli film “feels tactile and realistic”.

In Starting Point, a 2009 collection of essays and interviews focused on the Studio Ghibli
founder, Miyazaki explains: “Anime may depict fictional worlds, but I nonetheless believe that at
its core it must have a certain realism. Even if the world depicted is a lie, the trick is to make it
seem as real as possible. Stated another way, the animator must fabricate a lie that seems so
real, viewers will think the world depicted might possible exist,”
So how is this achieved? It starts with the animation of movement, which emulates the
semblance of a physical world and its logic – that could be Kiki’s bow blowing in the wind (Kiki’s
Delivery Service), the flickering lights of the Catbus (My Neighbour Totoro) or the laboured
movement of the hulking mutant insects of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Ishbrucker also points to the illusion of running that Ghibli use, known as the detailed ‘run cycle
sequence’. With Ghibli characters, running has ‘motivation’. It could be Anna’s frenzied run to
Marnie across the low-tide (When Marnie Was There), or Chihiro sprinting for her life from a
ravenous No Face (Spirited Away) – it’s all different. Other animations have made use of
rotoscoping, a less favoured technique where animators trace over motion picture footage to
create the most realistic action in their drawings – though it’s more realistic, Isbrucker argues
that animations don’t have to imitate every faction of real life, but just create an analogue of it
from which rules can be bent and broken to create fantasy.

As Miyazaki has previously related, “animators are themselves actors”, in that they must
consider their character’s motivations, as well as who they are with unspoken mannerisms and
expressions. There’s also ridiculously minute detail that creates familiarity – this could be
Chihiro putting her shoes on, taking her time to tap them, make them comfortable, and scramble
out like the movement of a real little girl.

Ishbrucker additionally takes us on a tour of the well-established otherworld in Spirited Away. Its
bathouse is shown to have various job posts, areas for sleeping, a variety of soap – countless
tiny details that make it seem like dozens of stories could be going on around Chihiro’s. In
Princess Mononoke, the gender roles of Irontown are subtly shown: the women’s domestic lives,
the men out in search of resources.

Ghibli has also cemented itself as a producer of stories across the spectrum – the mature, the
magical and the nostalgic. More subtle stories – including some that could be real-life, like From
Up on Poppy Hill and Ocean Waves – sit side-by-side with their fantasies. This is what
Ishbrucker claims shows Ghibli’s ability to expand “the coming of age of a medium” – to present
anime not just as a novelty, but a true purveyor of ideas and emotions.

How Studio Ghibli films can help us

rediscover the childlike wonder of our
connection with nature
Films with powerful environmentally centered narratives can transform our thinking and connect
us with nature in ways that scientific papers cannot. For example, Studio Ghibli, a renowned
Japanese film studio co-founded by animator Hayao Miyazaki, creates complex visual stories
about human-nature relationships that transcend barriers of culture or age. A key message of
Miyazaki’s work is that we must respect nature – or face our own destruction.
Miyazaki’s films offer viewers moments of escape into fantastical worlds that nonetheless echo
problems of modernity, demonstrating that it’s possible to portray complex environmental issues
through animation in a way that retains mainstream appeal.

As a conservation scientist and Studio Ghibli enthusiast, I’ve analysed the environmental
themes in three of its most well-known films: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), My
Neighbour Totoro (1988) and Princess Mononoke (1997).

Nausicaä

Nausicaä, released with a special recommendation from the World

Wildlife Fund for Nature, tells the story of an apocalyptic event that wreaks havoc on global
ecosystems. Surviving humans must coexist alongside the Toxic Jungle, a dangerous
landscape filled with poisonous fungal spores. Most humans fear the Toxic Jungle and seek to
destroy it. But what they don’t understand is that it’s cleansing the environment for their benefit.

Miyazaki designed the film to mirror our society, where prioritising short-term materialistic growth
over long-term environmental sustainability is predicted to lead to collapse. The film reminds us
that being at war with nature ultimately ends in our demise. To create a sustainable future, we
must work with nature rather than against it.

My Neighbour Totoro
In My Neighbour Totoro, a pair of young sisters move to a house in the countryside with their
father as their mother recovers from illness. The girls explore their new house and the
surrounding forest, forming a friendship with a large forest spirit named Totoro.
 During UK lockdowns, local green spaces
became a haven supporting my mental health and reminding me of my intrinsic connection to
nature and to other humans. As I saw children spending more time playing on the grass or
climbing trees, I realised the importance of unstructured playtime in nature. Indeed, a growing
body of research suggests that children’s interactions with the natural world are invaluable for
their wellbeing.

In Miyazaki’s film, the young sisters become friends with Totoro, explore their surroundings, and
discover their affinity for their environment. Totoro is depicted as a warm and nurturing mother
figure, representing and encouraging the healing effects of communing with nature: which have
been well-documented in research and culture.

Princess Mononoke
Princess Mononoke is set in 14th-century Japan, a world where the constant battle between
humans and forest kami (spirits) leads to casualties on both sides. In Shinto, a traditional
Japanese religion, these kami are part of nature – but they’re not soft-natured entities. When
humans refuse to respect their environment, they can seek revenge.

The film’s most powerful kami is the Forest Spirit (Shishigami), who is neither good nor evil but
represents the pure power of nature. During the day, Shishigami appears as a deer. At night, it
transforms into the eerie Night Walker. This transformation represents the duality of nature as a
bringer of life and death, echoing how the natural world has the ability to both support and
destroy humankind.
Similarly, the antagonist of the film, Lady Eboshi, isn’t in fact a clear-cut villain. Although she
wants to cut down the forest to feed iron mines, she’s also the kind, generous leader of Iron
Town, providing a haven for social outcasts and espousing gender equality. Yet despite her wish
to build a better society, her actions – however well-intentioned – will destroy the forest and the
homes of the kami.

This situation is a microcosm of ongoing environmental justice issues across the world, where
poor and marginalised groups, including Indigenous people and women, suffer for the actions of
the wealthy. In particular, although wealthy countries contribute the most to climate change, it’s
poorer countries that must carry the greatest climate-related burdens.

As viewers of Princess Mononoke, we’re being encouraged to move beyond dichotomies of “us
versus them”, thinking which allows groups with more power to distance themselves from those
without: or even to dehumanise them altogether. Miyazaki’s work is a lesson in seeking intrinsic
commonalities – what connects us rather than what divides – and using these to imagine fairer,
more equal societies that live in harmony with nature.

Studio Ghibli: a Japanese success story in

a faltering film world
The latest anime from director Hayao Miyazaki aced at the box office without any marketing. All
credit to his unique vision and passionate fans

In the razzmatazz that has greeted the big releases of the last fortnight, Mission: Impossible and
Barbie, a far more interesting event has passed almost unnoticed in the west. A film with
virtually no advance publicity had fans in Japan queueing around the block, taking $17.5m
(£13.5m) in its first weekend.

How Do You Live? is a new anime by the revered director Hayao Miyazaki, who reversed an
earlier decision to retire for what he has intimated will be his final full-length film. Until the eve of
its opening, when a free-to-use illustration was released, the film’s only publicity was a single
poster, published last year. It showed a crayon sketch of what – given the film’s stated debt to a
1937 novel by the Japanese children’s author Genzaburo Yoshino – was surmised to be a blue
and white heron.

Extraordinarily for a notoriously leaky industry, not a single drop of plot or character detail (both
reportedly independent of the book) had escaped from what was described by Mr Miyazaki’s
Studio Ghibli only as a “grand fantasy”. The film’s UK and US releases are probably more than a
year away, but word from Japan was that it is “very Ghibli‑esque”. This compliment loses
nothing in translation, since Studio Ghibli is up there with Pixar and Marvel as being its own
global benchmark, with its own gently charming aesthetic, passionate fanbase and museum.

Set up by Mr Miyazaki in 1985 with fellow director Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki,
the studio created an international foothold by going into partnership with Disney, while
protecting itself from Disneyfication with a strict “no edits” policy that has been more or less
obeyed.

Mr Miyazaki’s own films include the Oscar‑winning Spirited Away; Howl’s Moving Castle; and
the early cult hit, My Neighbor Totoro, which found a whole new audience in the UK last year
after being adapted into a multi award‑winning stage show. His son, Goro Miyazaki, has since
joined the studio, with adaptations of novels by Ursula K Le Guin and Diana Wynne Jones. The
latter was the studio’s first full length venture into computer generated imagery.

Explaining the absence of advance publicity for How Do You Live?, Mr Suzuki said: “In this age
of information technology, I thought that the lack of information itself would be entertaining.” It is,
of course, not quite as simple as that: the paucity of information unleashed viral flights of blue
herons across social media. The studio also laid down a powerful sentimental lure with the
suggestion that this would be Mr Miyazaki’s final film. Though this may indeed be the case,
given that he is 82 and it has taken him more than five years to animate this film, he has cried
wolf several times before.

At a time when the international film industry is floundering in a perfect storm of unfeasible
cost-to-box-office ratios, cinema audiences yet to return to pre-Covid levels, and striking writers
and actors, the real lesson of the quiet success of How Do You Live? might be that a unique
vision such as Mr Miyazaki’s offers unique solutions. The enormous success of anime in
general, and its own ardent following in particular, gave Studio Ghibli the bespoke option of
excising marketing costs, which can amount to as much as 50% of a film’s budget. It is not a
strategy that would work for everyone.

How Spirited Away Changed Animation

Forever
Twenty years ago, on July 20, 2001, a film that would become one of the most celebrated
animated movies of all time hit theaters in Japan. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by
Studio Ghibli, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, titled Spirited Away in English, would leave an
indelible mark on animation in the 21st century. The movie arrived at a time when animation was
widely perceived as a genre solely for children, and when cultural differences often became
barriers to the global distribution of animated works. Spirited Away shattered preconceived
notions about the art form and also proved that, as a film created in Japanese with elements of
Japanese folklore central to its core, it could resonate deeply with audiences around the world.

The story follows an ordinary 10-year-old girl, Chihiro, as she arrives at a deserted theme park
that turns out to be a realm of gods and spirits. After an overeating incident leads her parents to
turn into literal pigs, Chihiro must work in a bathhouse that serves otherworldly customers in
order to survive and find a way to return home.

Imaginative and inspired, Spirited Away immerses the viewer in a fantastical world that at once
astounds and alarms. Many of the deities are based on figures in Japanese folklore, and part of
the Japanese title itself, kamikakushi, refers to the concept of disappearance from being taken
away by gods. The story is also a tale of resilience and persistence, as Chihiro gradually draws
on her inner strength to endure this land where humans are designed to perish.
In a 2001 interview with Animage, Miyazaki said he had an intended audience in mind for the
film. “We have made [My Neighbor] Totoro, which was for small children, Laputa, in which a boy
sets out on a journey, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, in which a teenager has to live with herself.
We have not made a film for 10-year-old girls, who are in the first stage of their adolescence,”
he said, as translated by Ryoko Toyama. “I wondered if I could make a movie in which they
could be heroines.”

Spirited Away would go on to resonate far beyond its target demographic. Immediately upon
release, the film broke the opening weekend record in Japan by earning $13.1 million over three
days. It beat previous numbers set by another one of Miyazaki’s films, 1997’s Princess
Mononoke. Spirited Away went on to become Japan’s highest-grossing film of all-time, and held
the record for 19 years, surpassing $300 million at the local box office last year after the movie
was re-released. (It was eclipsed soon after by Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie:
Mugen Train in December.) .

In the years following Spirited Away’s premiere, the film traveled widely as it was screened at
international film festivals and released theatrically around the world. In 2020, it became
available to even more audiences when it entered Netflix’s catalog in dozens of countries and
joined HBO Max’s catalog in the U.S. when the platform launched with a Studio Ghibli collection.
Two decades later, the story of Chihiro continues to reach new audiences, including through
new formats: a stage adaptation of Spirited Away directed by John Caird (Les Misérables) and
produced by the Japanese entertainment company Toho, which originally distributed the
Miyazaki film in Japan, is set to premiere in 2022.

For its 20th anniversary, TIME looks back at Spirited Away’s historic path from Japanese
blockbuster to Oscar winner, its U.S. release by Disney following a complicated history between
Miyazaki and foreign distributors, and the film’s lasting impact on Japanese animation and
beyond.

The significance of Spirited Away’s box office records

and awards
Spirited Away raked in $234 million, overtaking Titanic to become Japan’s highest-grossing film.
Its commercial success helped make animation “a very significant, legitimate film genre in
Japan,” says Dr. Shiro Yoshioka, a lecturer in Japanese Studies at Newcastle University’s
School of Modern Languages and author of the chapter “Heart of Japaneseness: History and
Nostalgia in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away” in Japanese Visual Culture. He explains that its
popularity had a compounding effect on that of another Studio Ghibli release from four years
earlier. “Princess Mononoke was already successful and put animation on the map in Japan,” he
says of the 1997 film that was Japan’s box office leader before being unseated by Titanic. “Until
then, animation or anime was more like a niche genre,” Yoshioka explains

Dr. Rayna Denison, who wrote the chapter “The Global Markets for Anime: Miyazaki Hayao’s
Spirited Away” in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts and is a senior lecturer at the
University of East Anglia, says that while Studio Ghibli films had been growing in Japan’s box
office since Kiki’s Delivery Service was released in 1989, Spirited Away was able to reach
blockbuster status—surpassing records previously set by movies like E.T. and Jurassic Park.
“It’s a major shift in the local market proving that films from Japan could be the equivalent of, in
blockbuster terms, big Hollywood movies,” Denison says.
International critical acclaim soon followed the film’s domestic commercial success. At the 2002
Berlin International Film Festival, Spirited Away was a co-recipient of the Golden Bear, the first
animated feature to win the highest prize in the festival’s history. In 2003, Spirited Away was
awarded Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, becoming the first—and to this
day, only—non-English-language movie to win the award.

“The fact that a non-Western, Japanese animated film would win major awards from two major
Western sources was a very big shot in the arm to the Japanese animation industry,” says Dr.
Susan Napier, author of Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art and a professor at Tufts University. There
was also special significance to Spirited Away taking the Oscar win during only the second year
after the Best Animated Feature category was created. (Shrek was the first movie to win the
category.) “For so long, cartoons have been seen in the West—America in particular—as kind of
childish, vulgar, things that you didn’t take seriously,” Napier explains. When Spirited Away took
home the Academy Award, Napier says, “people were starting to say, wow, what’s all this about
animation that it’s getting its own category, that it’s considered a real art form.”

According to Yoshioka, the Oscar win was hugely important for Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli and
Japanese animation more broadly. “It made Japanese animation a more global film genre rather
than very niche,” he explains, noting that animation was no longer perceived to be content
strictly for otaku, a term often used to describe passionate fans of Japanese culture who heavily
consume entertainment like anime and manga.

Disney’s partnership with Studio Ghibli and the

complicated history behind it
A major component of Spirited Away’s global popularity was the partnership between Tokuma
Shoten, then the parent company of Studio Ghibli, and Disney. Forged in 1996, the agreement
gave Disney the home video rights to a handful of Studio Ghibli films in addition to the theatrical
rights for distributing Princess Mononoke outside of Japan. Disney would later acquire the home
video and theatrical rights to Spirited Away in North America.

But this partnership had a rocky history. Miyazaki was wary of foreign distribution for his films
after the director’s 1984 movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was infamously edited by
Manson International for its U.S. release. A full 22 minutes were cut from the original film, and it
was promoted as Warriors of the Wind with posters featuring male characters who do not
appear in the movie.

“The distributors edited the film in such a way that it’s become almost like a kind of children’s
adventure story, there’s no nuance,” says Yoshioka, noting that the movie, which follows the
heroine Nausicaä in a post-apocalyptic world, has a layered plot. “The assumption behind the
editing was that American audiences wouldn’t understand the storyline, because in the States
and in many Western countries, the assumption was that animation was for children.”
The heavy editing of Nausicaä was part of the reason why, when the U.S. release for Princess
Mononoke was in the works, Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki sent Harvey Weinstein—who
led Miramax, which was handling the film’s American distribution—a samurai sword with the
note, “no cuts.” The movie hit U.S. theaters in its uncut form in 1999, but did not perform
strongly at the box office—grossing $2.3 million for the initial release. Napier says it’s hard to
pinpoint why the film didn’t quite catch on. “Maybe at that point people weren’t quite ready for it.
It was another kind of dark film, it had an ambiguous ending,” she says. “It also doesn’t have a
conventional good-versus-evil kind of plot which American audiences tend to expect.”

By the time of Spirited Away’s limited release in the States in 2002, Napier says that Disney was
more familiar with Miyazaki as a brand. Another major difference from Princess Mononoke was
that Pixar’s John Lasseter, who had long been a fan of the Japanese director, was at the helm
of Spirited Away’s distribution and English adaptation efforts. “That kind of industrial support
from people in America that were, at the time, very well respected in the animation world was
really important to raising Miyazaki’s profile, raising the profile of Studio Ghibli,” Denison says.
Lasseter and Disney boosted Spirited Away’s visibility in America by heavily campaigning for the
film to be considered for the Academy Awards, including with a full-page advertisement in
Variety. “They were very, very careful to push the film to the foreground to keep it in everybody’s
minds,” she says. “And I think, in no small part, that’s one of the reasons it succeeded and won
the Best Animated Feature.”
Drawing in $10 million, the film did not see huge success in U.S. theaters. But Yoshioka says
that, in contrast to Princess Mononoke, it was the first Studio Ghibli movie to reach a broader
American audience. It also attracted significant viewership beyond the U.S, grossing around $6
million in France, for instance, and more than $11 millio in South Korea.

How Spirited Away influenced animation

Spirited Away is not just the only non-English-language animated film to have won an Oscar for
Best Animated Feature, it’s also the only hand-drawn animated film to receive the honor. Nearly
all of the other winners are computer-animated works. “Spirited Away comes at a time when
there’s a big changeover happening in Japanese animation, and more and more people are
using computers rather than traditional two-dimensional, cel-based animation,” Denison says,
referring to the technique in which every frame is drawn by hand. The film incorporated
computer animation, but sparingly.
“As a viewer, it’s very subtle and nicely done. It still looks like 2-D, more traditional film
animation,” says Dr. Mari Nakamura, a lecturer of modern Japanese studies and international
relations at Leiden University. “This is very characteristic of Japanese animation in
general—how to have a good balance between 2-D and 3-D.” And while many studios have left
behind two-dimensional animation over the decades, the style has remained core to Studio
Ghibli’s style. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly last May, Studio Ghibli’s Suzuki talked
about the hand-drawing process for Miyazaki’s upcoming film, How Do You Live? “We have 60
animators, but we are only able to come up with one minute of animation in a month,” he said.
“That means 12 months a year, you get 12 minutes worth of movie.” It’s a painstaking process,
but one that has undeniably shaped the singular animation aesthetic of Miyazaki films.

There is, indeed, plenty to think about in Spirited Away for audiences of all ages. Napier says
that in addition to the aesthetic impact of the film, there has also been a psychological one.
“This willingness to see children in a dark and scary world, the possibilities of children having to
confront dark and scary things on their own,” Napier says, “A number of anime were already
dealing with it before Spirited Away, but I think after that it becomes even more of an important
motif in Japanese animation.”

She draws similarities between Spirited Away and Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 film Your
Name—Japan’s fifth highest-grossing movie of all time—which tells the story of two high school
students, one boy and one girl, mysteriously swapping bodies. “Both stories, although they’re
very different, really are about young people confronting very strange, destabilized worlds,”
Napier says. Like Chihiro, whose name is taken away by the sorceress Yubaba and becomes
“Sen” as she begins work in the bathhouse, the characters Taki and Mitsuha in Your Name lose
their identities through the body switches. Napier hypothesizes that these themes relating to
uncertainty are connected to a dominant feeling in the 21st century of children being more on
their own and feeling at a loss. “I think one reason why these films are so popular is that they do
recognize and acknowledge that the world can be scary, and that we don’t always know what’s
going to happen to us,” Napier adds.

Outside of Japan, Miyazaki has inspired filmmakers from Wes Anderson to Guillermo del Toro.
In the case of the latter, Napier says that there are clear similarities between Spirited Away and
del Toro’s 2006 live-action fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. That movie’s main character, 10-year-old
Ofelia, is taken to the countryside to a new home like Chihiro was. Napier describes a scene in
Pan’s Labyrinth’s opening sequence, in which Ofelia gets out of the car and enters the forest, as
a direct homage to Spirited Away. “She sees a kind of stone image that is so overtly similar to
an early scene in Spirited Away when Chihiro confronts a stone image,” Napier explains.

And while not specific to Spirited Away, Pixar’s Lasseter—who directed films including Toy
Story, Cars and A Bug’s Life and in 2018 left the company after allegations of sexual
misconduct—has long spoken of his admiration for Miyazaki’s works. In Toy Story 3, the
character of Totoro even makes a cameo as a plushie. Napier points to a later Pixar film that
she thinks “really clearly shows influences from Spirited Away”: the 2015 movie Inside Out. “It’s
about a young girl who is, as with Spirited Away, leaving her old home for a new one,” Napier
says. “She’s being confronted by a variety of challenges and emotions.” Napier adds that it’s
another example of a female protagonist carrying the film, something that has only become
slightly more prevalent in the last decade after Pixar’s history of centering male protagonists.

Spirited Away embraced as a classic, 20 years later

As Denison puts it, “This is a film made by a master animator at the height of his powers and it
is one where the quality of the animation really does set it apart from everything else around it.
Nobody else was making films that looked like this or that were as inventive as this was at this
time.”

To Yoshioka, one reason why Spirited Away continues to be adored two decades after its
release is its ambiguous nature. “It’s not entirely clear when watching for the first time what the
story is about,” he says, adding that earlier Miyazaki films often had clearer themes. Spirited
Away can be interpreted in numerous ways by the viewer. “This sort of elastic or enigmatic
feature is key for the film to be loved as a classic,” he says. In this way, even 20 years on,
Spirited Away is a movie that can be watched and rewatched, pondered in solitude or mulled
over in company, the film’s meticulously crafted and intricately designed visuals washing over
you with each new viewing.