Which Studio Ghibli Character Are You?

Learn More About Studio Ghibli

Studio Ghibli was founded in Tokyo in June 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and producer Toshio Suzuki, on the strength of a single film. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind had been made the year before at another studio and performed well enough that its backers agreed to fund a permanent home for Miyazaki and Takahata to work. The name comes from an Italian aircraft, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli, itself named for a hot Saharan wind. Miyazaki, a lifelong aviation obsessive, liked the idea of blowing a new wind through Japanese animation.

The studio's first release, Castle in the Sky, arrived in 1986. What followed over the next four decades is one of the most consistent runs of quality in the history of the medium: My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies released as a double bill in 1988, Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, The Wind Rises, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and most recently The Boy and the Heron. Two of those films won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and Spirited Away remains the only hand-drawn, non-English-language film ever to do so.

What distinguishes a Ghibli film is harder to name than its animation style, though the style is distinctive enough. The studio is famous for what Miyazaki has called ma, the deliberate empty beat: a character sitting on a train watching the countryside, rain falling on a bus stop, someone quietly making breakfast. Western animation tends to treat every second as an opportunity for plot. Ghibli lets scenes breathe, and the effect is that its worlds feel inhabited rather than merely drawn.

Its protagonists are also unusual. They are frequently girls and young women, and they are almost never chosen ones. Chihiro is a sulky ten-year-old who saves her parents through persistence and basic decency. Kiki is a thirteen-year-old whose crisis is professional burnout. San is a young woman raised by wolves who spends most of Princess Mononoke furious. Very few Ghibli films have a villain in the conventional sense; even Lady Eboshi, who is destroying a forest, is protecting a community of people nobody else would house. The moral world is genuinely complicated, and children are trusted to handle it.

Isao Takahata, the studio's quieter co-founder, made a very different kind of film and is essential to understanding the place. Grave of the Fireflies is one of the most devastating war films ever animated. Only Yesterday is a slow, adult drama about a woman in her late twenties reassessing her childhood. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, his last film before his death in 2018, is drawn in loose charcoal and watercolor and looks like nothing else the studio has produced. Takahata could not draw; he directed by argument and instruction, which reportedly drove his animators to distraction and produced extraordinary results.

The studio has repeatedly appeared to be ending. Miyazaki has announced his retirement several times and returned each time, most recently with The Boy and the Heron in 2023, which won him a second Academy Award at eighty-two. Succession has never been cleanly resolved. Ghibli sold a controlling stake to the Japanese broadcaster Nippon TV in 2023, a move widely read as a practical answer to the question of what happens next.

Its cultural reach has only grown. The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka and the Ghibli Park in Aichi Prefecture draw enormous crowds. The films arrived on streaming relatively late and found an entirely new generation. And the studio's aesthetic has become a shorthand for a certain kind of gentleness that people increasingly seem to be looking for, which Miyazaki himself has viewed with characteristic suspicion.

If hand-drawn worlds and complicated heroines are what you are here for, try our Frieren quiz for another patient, melancholy fantasy, or our The Apothecary Diaries quiz for a clever girl navigating a world that underestimates her. So which are you: the stubborn one, the dazzling one, the furious one, the exhausted one, or the one who just sits with you in the rain?