The superiority of Studio Ghibli—over Disney and over AI slop.

The true integrity of the imagination.

Most of this piece isn’t going to be about the recent Ghibli slop produced by masses of ChatGPT users. If you want to appreciate real art and are concerned about the diminishing effect of AI slop, this is, I believe, the only sensible approach. If you hate the Ghibli slop, then don’t give it your attention. Lamenting the state of things is close kin to enabling them. Write about Ghibli itself. Write about the real art. You can’t have it both ways. Share the true image.

Instead, I am mostly going to write about why I think Ghibli is superior to Disney. The conclusion will then look at what a proper understanding of art can tell us about how we should react to the recent Ghibli slop. (And I take some mild-mannered exception to

Erik Hoel

’s recent piece.)

Growing up the Ghibli way

When my children were little (they are now seven and nine), I decided to indoctrinate them. This wasn’t a theoretic, ideological, or cultish indoctrination. I simply decided that they would be exposed to a lot of good art, so they would be able to start developing a sense of taste. Most children are carried along the cultural rush of whatever entertainment is most popular when they are young, and in this way their preferences are decided by the caprice of their times and their peers. For most children, that means Disney.

The means of my indoctrination were simple: we watched good movies together at the weekend. We started family movie time with My Neighbour Totoro, the 1998 Studio Ghibli classic, which Kurosawa once called one of the most important Japanese movies. They loved it. We have now seen it perhaps a dozen times. My daughter and I saw it on the big screen (in Japanese). Soon we are going again. Once, we wanted to show the first few minutes to my mother (“Granny doesn’t know Totoro!?”) and we ended up watching the whole thing while lunch was kept waiting.

From there we discovered many marvels—Ponyo, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaä… as with all great art, these films bear repeating, and we have seen them again and again and again. Although these films are incredibly popular online, and I have noticed they are popular among homeschoolers, I don’t often meet another British family who knows about Studio Ghibli. I am constantly exhorting my London acquaintances to try them.

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Whose strong female lead?

Alas, the grip of Disney is strong. I have little problem with the cultural hegemony of the United States. But I am stunned that all the same parents who are so precious about the idea that giving their daughters good female models will seriously affect their life trajectories will gladly allow Frozen to play on repeat. If Disney really wanted to do something radical, they could have just not had a princess at all.

The real “strong female leads” are all in Ghibli. In Totoro the girls’ mother is ill in hospital. They have to be mature and independent. At the end, Mai takes herself on a journey to the hospital, and when the alarm goes up that she is lost, her sister Satsuki goes looking for her. This is a real, serious adventure, with proper dangers. These girls are just like the children watching at home. This happens in Ponyo, when two five-year-olds navigate a flood together. In Nausicaä, it is the young princess of a small kingdom in a projected future who must quest to save her land. She fights the forces of war and natural destruction with her mysterious power of peaceful reconciliation. In Kiki’s Delivery Service a thirteen-year-old witch leaves home for a year to learn her craft. She sets up a small business.

The children in these movies are taken seriously. They do the laundry, wash the floors, explore the forest unsupervised, see clearly the dilemmas of the adult world, walk home in the rain. Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle is the opposite of a princess: she is a pragmatic put-upon sibling, the textbook fairy-tale character who never finds their fortune. She is cursed by a witch, turns into an old woman, and resolutely goes out into the wilderness to find the cure. In Princess Mononoke, the princess is a warrior who communes with wolves.

Perhaps the most direct contrast is between The Little Mermaid and Ponyo. Both tell similar stories. It’s a mermaid in one and a fish in another, daughter of a sea-king and daughter of a semi-human sea-wizard. They both want to marry a human. In Disney, she becomes a princess. In Ghibli, she becomes an ordinary girl. The course of true love might not ever run smooth, but it does run outside the palace gates. Whereas Disney adapted Hans Christian Andersen to their own particular brand of sing-song simplicity, Ghibli reimagined the whole thing, with influences from Greek and Japanese myth, Wagner, and John Everett Millais.

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Strange seriousness

It is this full-scale reimagining that makes Ghibli superior. Remove the songs from the Disney film and what’s left? The plot is thin and mechanical. The Ghibli version is dense with narrative. Small details are carefully arranged, and each time the children watch this film (we must be on seven viewings) they realise how much has been anticipated with passing features and motifs, often in the background. There is real magic in Ghibli. The tsunami sequence, where Ponyo escapes from her father and causes a huge storm which leads her back to the boy she loves, Sosuke, is one of the best sequences in all the Ghibli films. So much loving attention is paid to the creation of every frame, every inch of every frame. It is thrilling to watch time after time.

So awed by Ghibli have my children been that when they watch films like Toy Story they are underwhelmed. It starts out great, with the toy soldiers going on their mission with the walkie-talkies and then the arrival of Buzz Lightyear. But the last third is Hollywood overkill. How many stunts can you pull? The rocket and the car chase and the flying through the air. The violations of the laws of physics are so extreme, so unctuous, so ill-considered. Yes, this is a film where the toys can talk and walk, but it is still our world. Children know that things don’t happen like that: fireworks don’t neatly propel toys through car sunroofs during a car chase. It is like eating too much sugar at a party. They eventually get sick of it.

Ghibli respects the integrity of its worlds. There is cartoonish exaggeration, for example in the jelly-like swerve of the speeding car, but it is not a violation of nature. When things get crazy, it is because there is magic involved. And the magic systems have their own integrity. There is coherence to the use of these powers. The aim is not to pile up special effects and stunning twists and explosive action, but to build a narrative. Boredom has set in with other Pixar films, too. Perhaps the only one they enjoyed was Monsters Inc. They liked Inside Out, because the emotion characters are funny (Oh I’ll show you “attitude” old man!) and because they can relate to the way our emotions overtake us—but aesthetically that film too is a glib romp and the kids know it. They frequently request Nausicaä, almost never Inside Out. When we saw the recent sequel they were adamant: some of it was fun, but it’s not a good movie. Not like Studio Ghibli. Likewise, Cars was insanely dull.

As well as not taking children seriously enough, Disney lacks any sense of the truly strange. Their films fit a middle-class model of “weird enough”: you are not at risk of being unable to explain something in a Disney film. Watch The Cat Returns, however, and try to explain what happens to someone who hasn’t seen it, and you will be given looks of either deep curiosity or stark bemusement. Again and again, Studio Ghibli mingles the marvels of everyday life (the joys of food and home and sunshine and the radio) with the truly bizarre: a cat-bus, a crystal that stops a child from dying in free-fall, chattering bone-like forest spirits, a bath house where the spirits go to ablute (and whose boiler is worked by a man with six arms), a fish-girl who runs upon the waves (like Venus in the myth). Where Disney aims to entertain, Ghibli wishes to enchant.

Imagination not fancy

The presiding ethos of a Disney film is excitement. For Ghibli, it is nostalgia. They (re-)make the world of lost innocence. Both the real one, in which children used to grow up, and the imaginative one, still, as the films frequently hint, available to us all, young or old. It is this power of the imagination that fundamentally sets Ghibli apart.

The traditional distinction between fancy and imagination is the difference between bundling familiar things and creating something truly new. Disney is largely fancy. It is all trope agglomeration. No child actually has an imaginary friend called Bing-Bong who is a cat-elephant-dolphin-raccoon-candy-floss combination and who cries sweets. This is saccharine sentimentality, a movie trope devised from the twee notions of childhood creativity cherished by adults with a greater passion for bureaucracy than art. (Check the literature, this is a coy adult idea, not a childhood reality.)

Ghibli has the power of imagination. The cat-bus in Totoro clearly owes a debt to Alice in Wonderland, but it is its own thing entirely, unable to be reconstituted in any other world. There is nothing else quite like the world of Castle in the Sky, which draws on Jonathan Swift, a Welsh mining strike, and Shinto (often a Ghibli influence), and it has inspired masses of anime in its wake. Ghibli as a whole was also influential on the Final Fantasy game series, which borrowed elements like Sheeta’s crystal and the chocobos from Nausicaä, as well as having many similar world-building elements, including the Ghibli obsession with airships.

Disney isn’t all bad. The early shorts are works of genius, and my children laugh themselves silly every time we watch them. When my son first saw the musical cow in Steamboat Willie he laughed so hard I thought he would pop. (You can get them on Disney+, just be careful to watch the classic ones, not the new stuff.) They remain obsessed with the Lion King. And while Fantasia remains a bit old-school to be really exciting, they remember it all. They loved the music and the dinosaurs. There’s real magic in some of the classics like Snow White, too.

But that’s the problem with Disney. Who now would take children so seriously as to crowd the stage with centaurs and satyrs, who then give way to the stegosaurus backed by Stravinsky, reverting to Leopold Stokowski? Who would let abstract shapes occupy the screen, pulsing to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor? Seriously, who would play full-orchestra Stravinsky to young children today? Instead, we too often get twirls, whirls, chord shifts, and animals doing the rumba.¹ And even Fantasia, for all its marvels, becomes too twee.

The sentiment of real life

Disney is fun. It is whimsical, fanciful. But it now has a much weaker moral core, not enough serious purpose, no real interest in what it is like to be a child. It is a confection for the imagination, not a demanding act of creativity. Ghibli packs more action into one film than Disney manages in two. It shows parents being hypocrites and children being responsible, but in a lowkey, real-life way—without the cartoon excess that makes it all seem so apart from normal life. Ghibli never stoops to explain. They let the film explain itself.

So often in Ghibli films, the children are right. So often, the brilliant darkness of early Disney (like Pinocchio) is presented with honesty and without terror. Ghibli celebrates the pleasure of fresh vegetables, hard work, and the defiance of strict authority. There are earnest nerds and lonely demure girls. There are friendly relationships between children and the elderly. There are rainstorms and toxic pollution. There are moments of great violence and stunning beauty. There are plenty of jokes. There is plenty of fun. But unlike Disney, it is more than mere fun. It is honest.

Some fans believe No Face in Spirited Away to be a representation of autism: he masks (literally), is non-verbal, struggles to socialise, and gets driven crazy by the bath-house. (Others have found neuro-divergence in Ponyo and Princess Mononoke.) The film is primarily about a girl called Chihiro who is moving home and worries about fitting in. Almost every character has some loneliness problem of this sort. As well as being a stunning story of dragons, ghosts, witches, and transfiguration, it is a representation of what it is like to fit in and to not fit in. As befits such a theme, the story is huge, multi-faceted, scary, hilarious, uncomfortable. Both Chihiro and No Face find their true home, find people they can love and communicate with. This sounds sentimental, and it is, in the good way. This is the sentiment of real life! This is not the gushing sentimentality of an overloaded Disney film. Children really feel like this. So do many adults. The pleasure of Spirited Away is that, at the end, no-one has to pretend to be someone they are not anymore. (Warning, this one is much scarier on the big screen.)

This is the presiding message of all Ghibli films. Ghibli lets children see what life is really like, both in reality and in the kingdoms of our minds. It doesn’t make jokes over their heads designed for the parents, never hints without allowing the child to understand. It never patronises for the sake of the box office. It is true art, truly made for children, and for all those who know the difference between the fancy of a firework-fuelled car chase and the imaginative power of seeing the spirit world, of believing when you are not believed.

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AI slop Disneyfied Ghibli. Ignore it.

It shouldn’t need saying, but all of this is both the reason why there was a recent glut of “Ghibli-style” images made by ChatGPT and why there was such a strong reaction against those images. There is a particular sort of demand for Ghibli that is different to the demand for Disney, and different to the demand for slop. To my eye, the AI images didn’t really look like Ghibli. It was a fairly tame and flattened imitation. I didn’t register them as Ghibli until I saw it labelled as such. (I wasn’t on Twitter that week and gladly missed most of them.) If, like

Erik Hoel

, you are worried about the corrosive effects of seeing such images, well, then don’t make them. I am truly baffled that Erik, who is such an AI sceptic, joined in with all of this.

But more seriously, while something may have been lost by this ability to churn out Ghibli slop, I don’t think it is a loss that will affect the art. Erik worries that Ghibli slop is akin to “semantic satiation”, that the mass repetition of flattened Ghibli-style images will numb our ability to enjoy the real art. I used to spend my life surrounded by crass advertising. The modern world is always saturating us with its vulgar catch phrases, gopping colours, mundane TV programmes, memes that are worked to the point of boredom, and so on.

All of that fades away as I step into the National Gallery or the Prince Charles Cinema. Life is often vile.

The city is dirty and smelly. People talk such nonsense (and such horrible nonsense) on the bus. The airwaves are filled with the trivialities of The Rest is History or Joe Rogan. But when we open a great book, hear great music, or watch Totoro, we are entering into the kingdom of art.

It is a different place. It doesn’t have to be corrupted by the satiation of our world. Don’t let it. Concentrate. Allow yourself to enter the dream of the art. The fact that a lot of people Disneyfied Ghibli using ChatGPT is no more a threat to the enjoyment of Totoro than the existence of Disney itself.

My children suffer no diminishment from real Ghibli satiation. You can watch Totoro again and again and again and enjoy it more, see more of it. Nina Li Coomes wrote in the Atlantic about seeing Spirited Away when it came out in Japan, watching it whenever she could on video tape, and now getting even more out of it when she can watch Ghibli films whenever she wants on streaming. Great art does not diminish during saturation, it improves.

Without putting Spirited Away on in the background as I folded laundry, I would never have noticed that the film begins not with an image or a title card but with a sound: Joe Hisaishi’s unresolved arpeggio sets the stage before Miyazaki even allows us to see his animation, asking us to consider the uncanny, alluring world we’re about to enter with a moment of music. … Spirited Away change[s] upon being revisited, from an interaction with narrative and plot to a momentary immersion in a fantastical, yet somehow familiar, world. Now, as an adult, I recall my childhood horror at No Face, even as I feel intrigued by his blank, smiling visage. I revisit these past selves scattered across the film, greeting them as I notice new things and delve deeper.

Art remains itself. Go to it. Share in the true image. Be like the children and immerse yourself—again and again and again.

1. Some people say the answer is Bluey, but they don’t do very much, and they don’t simply play the orchestral version. Looney Tunes played children a lot of music otherwise reserved for adults.