Random Studio Ghibli Movie

What this list is

This is the complete or near-complete output of a single small animation studio in Tokyo, and that is the first remarkable thing about it. Not a genre, not a catalogue of hundreds. The life's work of a handful of people who decided to make hand-drawn films properly, refused to compromise on how they were shown, and became one of the most beloved names in cinema.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few from the list:

• My Neighbor Totoro
• Spirited Away
• Princess Mononoke
• Grave of the Fireflies
• Kiki's Delivery Service
• Porco Rosso
• The Boy and the Heron
• The Red Turtle

That is a small number of films. Most studios make that many in a few years. These took decades, because they were largely drawn by hand, frame by frame, by people who thought that was the only honest way to do it, and who would rather make few films well than many films fast.

Drawing a film

1. Press Generate for one film.
2. Ask for a few to pick from.
3. Type into Contains to search the titles.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these titles come from

The films of a single celebrated animation studio, gathered and checked by hand. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The name means a hot desert wind

The studio's name comes from an Arabic word for the hot, dry wind that blows north out of the Sahara. But the founder did not take it from Arabic directly. He was an aviation obsessive, and he took it from an Italian aircraft of the Second World War that had been named after that wind.

The meaning he attached to it tells you the studio's whole intention. He wanted the name to signal that they would blow a new wind through the animation industry, which he felt had grown formulaic, cautious and cheap. The name was a statement of purpose disguised as a word: we are here to disrupt a stagnant business by making animation the way it ought to be made.

There is a small, characteristic detail. The founders knew the name was being mispronounced, that the Italian original had a hard sound the Japanese version dropped. They kept it anyway. The concept mattered more than the phonetics, and they trusted the name to carry its meaning regardless of how it was said. That indifference to getting the surface exactly right, combined with total seriousness about the thing underneath, is the studio in miniature.

The film that was butchered, and what it taught them

Before the studio existed, its founder made a film that would later be released abroad, and what happened to it shaped everything the studio would go on to do.

When that earlier film reached the United States, it was cut. Heavily. Something like half an hour of it was removed, dialogue and character development gone, whole parts of the plot and its themes erased, and it was renamed and reshaped into a simpler, more marketable thing. The people who had made it watched their work be gutted to fit what a foreign distributor assumed audiences wanted from a cartoon.

The founder and his colleague were so appalled that they refused, for about the next decade, to allow their films to be released in the West at all. They would rather their work not be seen abroad than be seen mutilated. That is an extraordinary stance for a studio that needed money, and it tells you exactly how seriously they took the integrity of what they made.

Out of that anger came a rule that became famous in the industry: no edits. When the studio finally did license its films abroad, it did so on the condition that not a frame could be cut. The films had to be shown exactly as made, complete, or not shown at all. A studio that made gentle films about children and spirits and flying machines was, on the question of its own work, completely unyielding.

The sword

There is a story attached to this policy, and whether or not every detail is exact, it has become the perfect emblem of the studio's attitude.

The tale goes that when one of the studio's major films was being licensed for the West, and there was concern that the distributor might want to trim it for length or content, the studio made its position unmistakable. A producer at the distributor received, in the post, a real sword, or in some tellings a note bearing a single unmissable instruction. The message was the same either way: no cuts.

The film in question runs well over two hours, is violent, morally complicated, and refuses the tidy resolution a family cartoon is supposed to have. Everything about it invited a nervous distributor to reach for the scissors. The sword, real or apocryphal, said: do not.

The film was released uncut. And the reason the story has survived, and gets retold at exactly this studio and no other, is that it captures something true even if the sword is legend. Here was a maker of the most tender films imaginable, drawing a hard line with an implied blade, insisting that gentleness on screen and ferocity about your work are not opposites. You can make the softest thing in the world and defend it like a warrior.

Two men who made completely different films

People tend to imagine the studio as one man's vision, but it was really two, and they made very different kinds of film, which is why the list above is stranger than its reputation suggests.

One was the famous one, who made the flying, magical, hopeful films: children and witches and spirits and impossible machines in the sky, films full of wonder and movement and a deep love of the natural world. These are the ones that made the studio's name, and they are what most people picture when they hear it.

The other made something almost opposite. His most famous film is one of the most devastating ever animated, a quiet, unbearable story of two children starving in the last months of a war. It has almost no magic in it. It is grounded, grave, and so sad that many people cannot watch it twice. He made down-to-earth dramas and folk tales, and where his colleague reached for the sky, he stayed close to the ground and the human heart.

This is why the studio matters more than any single film of it. It proves the point that gets made about animation everywhere: that it is a medium, not a genre, that it can hold the most hopeful and the most sorrowful stories with equal seriousness, that flying witches and starving children can come from the same small building. The list above is not one kind of film. It is the full range of what animation can do, made by a few people who refused to make it any way but properly.

Questions people ask

Is there an order to watch these in?

No, they are almost all standalone films with no shared continuity, so you can start anywhere. A common suggestion is to begin with one of the gentle, hopeful films to get the feel of the studio, and to approach the very sad ones only when you are ready for them.

Are these children's films?

Some are, some very much are not, and that is the whole point. The studio made films for every age, from tender stories small children love to grave, adult work about war and mortality. Assuming they are all for children is exactly the mistake the studio spent its career pushing against.

Why does the hand-drawn look matter so much?

Because the studio treated it as a matter of principle, not nostalgia. The painstaking hand-drawn animation, backgrounds included, produces a warmth and a density of detail that the founders believed machines and shortcuts could not match, and preserving that standard was part of why they made so few films so slowly.

Which is the saddest one?

The war film about the two children is the one people mean, and it has a reputation as one of the most heartbreaking films in any medium. Approach it knowing that; it is a masterpiece, and it is not an easy watch, and it is the clearest proof of how far this studio's range extends beyond wonder.

References

1. Studio Ghibli, on the name's origin, the founders, and the studio's history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli
2. Hayao Miyazaki, on the butchered Western release of Nausicaä and the decade-long refusal of Western releases that followed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki