For Fans of Studio Ghibli

Long before the conversation about representation in animation became widespread, Hayao Miyazaki was simply making films where girls acted. Nausicaa navigates toxic wastelands on her glider and communes with insects that terrify everyone else. Kiki moves to a strange city alone at twelve and builds a life from scratch. Chihiro descends into a bathhouse of spirits to rescue her parents and does not once stop being herself despite enormous pressure to become someone else. These are not sidekick arcs or love stories, they are bildungsromane where competence, empathy, and persistence are the heroic virtues. The template has influenced a generation of filmmakers, Japanese and otherwise.

Hayao Miyazaki draws all the oxygen in conversations about Ghibli, but Isao Takahata's work is equally essential, and in some respects even more daring. Grave of the Fireflies is one of the most emotionally devastating films ever made in any medium. Only Yesterday refuses narrative momentum in favor of a forty-year-old woman's ruminative memories. Pom Poko is a political comedy about raccoon dogs losing their habitat that keeps shifting tone. My Neighbors the Yamadas is a domestic sketch film drawn in deliberate loose brushstrokes, the antithesis of Miyazaki's lush detail. Takahata never worked in the same mode twice, and his body of work is a reminder that the studio's identity is bigger than any one director.

No studio renders food the way Ghibli does. The herring-and-pumpkin pie Kiki fails to deliver. The bento boxes in Only Yesterday. The udon Chihiro brings to Haku. The bread and cheese in Howl's kitchen. These are not incidental moments, they are the films' beating heart: evidence that bodies exist, that sustenance matters, that pleasure in simple things is not naive. Studio Ghibli understands that to love a character you must first believe they are hungry. This is a lesson many more expensive productions have never learned.

Any conversation about what makes Ghibli films feel the way they feel has to account for Joe Hisaishi. His scores do not accompany the films so much as breathe with them. The Totoro theme is one of the most immediately recognizable melodies in cinema. The piano and strings in Princess Mononoke carry the film's grief and grandeur in equal measure. Hisaishi's music is so bound up in the Ghibli experience that it is genuinely difficult to imagine these films existing without it. His concert performances of Ghibli scores, documented on several live albums, are essential listening for anyone who wants to understand the studio's emotional architecture.