To get the pedantic bit out of the way first, the Japanese title of Miyazaki Hayao’s twelfth and probably final feature film, the 21st and probably final theatrical feature released by Studio Ghibli, the great animation company he co-founded in the 1980s, is 君たちはどう生きるか. This translates to How Do You Live?, which is also the […]
Earwig and the Witch, the first feature made by the reborn Studio Ghibli after it seemingly closed up shop for good with 2014’s When Marnie Was There and the 2016 co-production The Red Turtle, finds the company trying to create a new artistic identity for itself. I would say that I am uncertain of how stable […]
The Red Turtle is a miracle of transnational cinema: a great Dutch animation director hand-picked by Japanese filmmaking legends to make his feature debut with a Franco-Belgian co-production supported by a Japanese studio. The Japanese legends being Takahata Isao (who serves as this film’s producer) and Miyazaki Hayao, and the studio being Studio Ghibli. Which […]
The good news: with From Up on Poppy Hill, which was released in Japan in 2011, internationally beloved Studio Ghibli finally managed to bring back a director for a second time, outside of the legendary pair of Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao. It is, accordingly, the best indication that we’ve ever had that the studio […]
Here’s a stat to chill the heart of any fan of painterly, hand-drawn animation and prefer their family movies to be told with gentle grace rather than screaming pop culture references and fart jokes: of the 18 feature films produced in the 26-year history of Studio Ghibli, fully two-thirds of them have been directed by […]
The idea of a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books predates the existence of Studio Ghibli itself, as well of three of the (so far) six novels in the series. In the early 1980s, long before he’d gained any fame whatsoever in the West, the relatively green anime director Miyazaki Hayao […]
Studio Ghibli, as a rule, doesn’t do sequels; this is a core value stated outright by company leader Miyazaki Hayao, who has categorically refused to follow-up on any of his own stories, and the rest of the company’s artists has seemed content to follow suit (one must wonder what Miyazaki’s buddy John Lasseter thinks about […]
Takahata Isao’s most recent feature to date, as of June 2010, My Neighbors the Yamadas opens with an image that is simultaneously simple and deeply significant: a child’s pencil drawing, forming before our eyes. There are two meanings to this opening shot, one ironic and the other quite serious. For there is, on the one […]
1994’s Pom Poko was the eighth feature-length film produced by Studio Ghibli; it was the seventh to be directed by either Miyazaki Hayao or Takahata Isao. That this saturation of the studio’s creative output by just two filmmakers – neither of them young men – was less than ideal needs no explanation, and thus it […]
Through the end of 1993, it would be possible to make a certain generalisation about the films produced by Studio Ghibli, that would go something like this: Miyazaki Hayao directs fantasies, everybody else directs realistic stories. That neat dichotomy came screeching to a halt in 1994, when Ghibli’s second-most prolific director, Takahata Isao, gave the […]
Even today, Studio Ghibli has the reputation (in the United States, anyway) of being the company that makes Miyazaki Hayao’s films – oh, and these others ones, over here. That’s not fair at all, of course: as of this writing, Ghibli has released 16 films* (lucky number 17 is on the way), and exactly half […]
“I didn’t intend for the ten-year-old me to come along on this trip”, muses 27-year-old Taeko (Imai Miki) early in Only Yesterday, the fifth feature produced by Studio Ghibli. And yet the fifth-grade incarnation of Taeko (Honna Youko) is a constant companion in her older self’s inner life throughout the ten-day vacation in the Yamagata […]
