Studio Ghibli is renowned for being one of the leading animation companies, with fans around the world, and decades worth of high-quality productions. They make films which are truly imaginative, and their success lies in the fact that they are aimed not just at children, but rather to the young at heart, while also containing a range of highly complex themes relating to the real world. Nature is a key area, seen in such highly regarded fantasies like Princess Mononoke (1997), set within a mystical forest at odds with a feudal society destroying its environment, to Miyazaki’s latest film The Wind Rises (2013), where a fighter aircraft engineer sees his inventions used as tools to wage war. Coming-of-age narratives are also quite common in Ghibli films, and titles like Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), about a teenage witch attempting to live a normal life, and Whisper of the Heart (1995), a quasi-fantasy about a girl and the boy who has checked out all the library books she chooses, are certainly uncharacteristic takes on the type of bildungsroman often seen in the Western World.

Founded in 1985 between Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki, Ghibli was meant to be an animation studio focused around the idea of artistic potential and ability, unconstrained by the demands of other Japanese studios creating empty products meant to sell merchandise above all else. Their first major feature, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) a post-apocalyptic tale about a young princess who must stop a kingdom from waging war against a rival group of creatures, was an unprecedented success and resulted in Miyazaki and Takahata obtaining the creative freedom they required to kickstart Ghibli. The first production released under the namesake, Castle in the Sky (1986), following a young boy and girl caught in a race against time to find a magical floating castle, did not reach the heights of Nausicaa, but did help to bolster their reputation and was a sizeable hit in its own regard. The double-bill of Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and My Neighbor Totoro (1988) also did not manage to draw huge crowds, despite being seen today as two of the most enigmatic works to emerge from the studio.