Lessons from Ghibli
by Joshua Fagan
There are few companies that have become so famous simply from being so beloved as Studio Ghibli. The company behind films ranging from the sweetly lyrical My Neighbor Totoro to the sprawling and philosophical Princess Mononoke, Ghibli is the first name in Japanese animation. Back in the 90s, the only Americans who knew Ghibli were hardcore anime fans or impressed animators. One of those animators was Pixar pioneer John Lasseter, who played an integral role in having Ghibli films translated and presented to an American audience. These releases, spurred by Spirited Away becoming the first film not in the English language to win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, popularized a suite of delightful and affecting Ghibli films to new audiences. Even the average mainstream filmgoer who knows nothing of Japanese history or culture now has at least a vague recognition of Spirited Away.
As Disney and even Pixar have stumbled in recent years, Ghibli has emerged as a promising alternative. These ethereal and daring films provide comfort to consumers exhausted by the onslaught of upcoming sequels, like Toy Story 5 and Frozen III, as well as supposedly original films that function as regurgitations of past cliches, like Wish, which Deadline called “an odd sort of greatest-hits package that ticks all the boxes for what passes as inspirational fare these days.” To creative people of all stripes, however, they offer something arguably greater: a blueprint to capturing the intensity and immediacy of experience. Ghibli films feel fresh not simply because of their aesthetic difference from other animated films, but because they feel organically alive. Every leaf and tree, every beam of sunlight shining upon a forest clearing, feels novel and unique, existing outside of threadbare habits and routines.
Learning from Ghibli does not mean developing a fascination with airplanes or environmentalism, though both interests are crucial to Ghibli’s artistry and especially to its celebrated co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. The wonder and delight of Studio Ghibli owes partly to its choice of subjects but significantly more to its treatment of those subjects. Ghibli films have a magic that has little to do with the overt presentation of magical powers.
Too many films have an overtly magical setting, but this magic is as controlled, inert, and lifeless as the movements of factory workers. The newest Ant-Man or Harry Potter movies do nothing to quicken the pulse and excite the mind: they have a formula and never deviate from it. Some of the most enchanting Ghibli works have nothing to do with the fantastical. Whisper of the Heart focuses on an excitable tween writer, Shizuku, in the outer regions of Tokyo, and yet when she races down a towering set of stairs with the blue sky before her, the ebullient magic of the scene is palpable. The film provides the practical, quantifiable layer of the situation, where she is only a daydreaming and somewhat mischievous kid, but there is another layer too, and it is that secondary layer that the film values. It conveys the essential spirit of the situation as she experiences it.
One could refer to this layer as “how she feels about herself and her environment,” but such a phrase overstates the importance of her conscious, subjective mind. When scenes play from the stories she imagines, those are explicit trips into her subjectivity. The ordinary scenes where she explores suburban neighborhoods and sees the antique treasures they contain are not projections of her psyche, but they convey the spirit of her experiences. She does not necessarily understand these interactions or what to feel about them, but they impact her nonetheless. The magic is not in what she chooses to do or think but in the specific nature of the experience as it appears to her. This layer of experience is ceremonial and ritualistic, not external and utilitarian. She does not provide this extra layer of meaning; it appears to her with as much vividness and immediacy as the sky or the stairs. To reduce her experience to its external elements is not only disenchanted but artistically dishonest. Whisper of the Heart and other Ghibli films are true to this ritualistic weight of experience, and they reveal how its presence manifests in the most mundane moments.
Martin Heidegger, the German existentialist philosopher, calls this ceremonial plane of experience the “worldhood of the world.” As a phenomenologist, he contemplated the specific character of experience as it appears. By “appears,” he does not mean the opposite of “really is.” His most famous example is a hammer: the individual does not experience the hammer primarily for its physical characteristics but as an object with a particular function in the world. As he writes of experiences, their worldhood is the “condition which makes it possible for entities within-the-world to be discovered at all.” Shizuku does not create or even acknowledge the texture of her experiences. It depends on her in the sense that it emerges from her history and preconceived notions, but she encounters it unconsciously and unthinkingly. When she starts writing, the same landscapes she has seen a thousand times become new and laden with mystery and wonder; they are wellsprings of inspiration. Such a transformation does not depend on her choices and thoughts, necessarily. Her crossing the threshold into being a writer is a ritual of sorts, and so the nature of how her environment appears to her changes. Everyday life becomes more exciting but also more terrifying and tense as she struggles to prove herself.
Ghibli comprehends that the spirit of a character’s experiences matters more than the actions they accomplish. Amusingly, Shizuku herself does not yet understand this truth, as she is too inexperienced. The stories she creates are bright and airy, but the film knows there is something missing in them. They are the products of an active but young mind that adores wild twists and heightened drama. Her own life-narrative has more poignancy because the film does not depend on constant, heedless excitement. Instead, it simply illuminates with clarity and immediacy the basic character of her experiences.
In ordinary life, the practical side of life is foremost. There are obligations to perform, necessities to buy, goals to achieve. The essences of experiences remain concealed and cloaked, outside of certain moments, such as silent reflections or religious services. In art, the order flips. The primary experiences displayed are relatively unimportant; what matters is how the artwork treats them. Otherwise, Wikipedia summaries would be sufficient replacements for engaging with a story.
Effective and moving art, whether it has the lightness of Totoro or the elegiac solemnity of Mononoke, tends toward the vivid and visceral. Making such art means avoiding vagueness and trite generalities. It means divorcing sensations and moments from expected and conventional associations and revealing the hidden wonder and mystery lurking within them. As T.S. Eliot writes, “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
The greatest magic of Ghibli does not come from its inventively fantastical worlds, as admirable as those are. Admiring how that magic manifests even in the “ordinary” Whisper of the Heart demonstrates how it occurs everywhere in Ghibli: it is not about choice of subject, but about a mode and register of storytelling. It does not enchant life as much as it reveals the enchantment that was already latently present. As Susan Napier writes, Ghibli’s animated films encourage “metamorphosis, hybridity, and boundary crossing, which force us to consider our place in the world and in relation to others.” A Ghibli world is, despite the frequent presence of witches and spirits, very similar to the ordinary world, except it is the ordinary world seen more clearly and directly, without the distractions that block understanding in ordinary life.
As such, the “Ghibli touch” is not only characteristic of one company. It can belong to any artist who creates with unaffected sincerity and vibrant attention to detail, who understands the importance of portraying the internal spirit of places and experiences instead of reducing them to quantifiable data points. There is nothing inaccessibly Japanese about it. Admittedly, Ghibli films emerge from a Japanese cultural context, but the same milieu produced works that are extremely different, from Evangelion to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Avoiding cultural essentialism is important: there is no one single “Japanese aesthetic,” and nothing in Ghibli is so constrained to that culture that it does not have broader applicability. Ghibli takes significantly from Europe in its settings, designs, even music and is the better for it. Americans and Europeans would benefit from taking from Ghibli, allowing the immediacy and vividness of its films to inspire an escape from a stagnant and mechanistic artistic landscape. A similar occurrence happened in the late nineteenth century, when Japan first opened to global trade, and outsiders marveled at the stylized, elliptically suggestive elegance of ukiyo-e prints, such as those of Hiroshige and Hokusai.
The impressed Oscar Wilde famously remarked that “the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” as there “is no such country; there are no such people.” His point is that Japan is a land of omnipresent art, where nothing is merely in its unadorned and mundane state. Dreamlike wonder and mystery arise from the intentional departure from trite, mechanistic realism. Regardless of whether this is a grounded view of Japanese aesthetics, it inspired and nourished his conceptions of what art can and should be. Ghibli should have the same effect in the twenty-first century. The Ghibli conception of art is beautiful, but it is also useful. These films methodically demonstrate the potential to capture the core of experiences and sensations, to strip them of rote and predictable associations and thus see them fully. Such potential has value not just for animators, but for any creative people wanting to convey the beguiling, palpable enchantment of life.
Joshua Fagan is an award-winning writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.