A girl whose parents have been turned into pigs takes work in a bathhouse for gods and is given a new, shorter name by its witch (2001)
Spirited Away — won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and the Golden Bear at Berlin.
Film · Animation & documentary
Hayao Miyazaki
born 1941 · Japanese
Japanese animation; co-founder of Studio Ghibli
Hayao Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 and has since made the most widely admired hand-drawn features in the world: fantasies built around flight, forests, unglamorous work and girls who rescue themselves. He has won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature twice, taken the Golden Bear at Berlin, and announced his retirement so often that the announcements are a running joke. He remains, at eighty-five, reported to be working on another feature.
How to spot them
- ▸Flight of every kind: brooms, biplanes, flying castles, airships and a cat bus
- ▸Young female protagonists with jobs to do, and villains who turn out to be complicated rather than evil
- ▸Shinto-tinged nature spirits, polluted forests and a pacifism at odds with his love of aircraft
- ▸Hand-drawn animation defended against computers, and the composer Joe Hisaishi on almost every film
- ▸Serial, unreliable retirements — after Princess Mononoke, after The Wind Rises, and again since
Key films
Two sisters in rural post-war Japan meet a huge grey forest spirit at a bus stop in the rain, and travel in a grinning cat (1988)
My Neighbour Totoro — its title character became Studio Ghibli's logo.
A thirteen-year-old witch must spend a year living alone, and pays her way carrying parcels by broomstick with a black cat (1989)
Kiki's Delivery Service.
A prince cursed by a boar-god rides into a war between an iron-smelting town and the wolf-raised girl and forest spirits defending the woods (1997)
Princess Mononoke — for a time the highest-grossing film in Japanese history.
A girl aged into an old woman by a curse takes work as a cleaner in a walking, smoke-belching house belonging to a vain wizard (2004)
Howl's Moving Castle — from Diana Wynne Jones's novel.
In a poisoned world a princess glides on a jet-powered glider and communes with giant armoured insects (1984)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind — made before Ghibli existed, but its success led directly to the studio's founding.
A First World War fighter ace, now a bounty hunter over the Adriatic with the face of a pig, refits his seaplane in Milan (1992)
Porco Rosso.
A boy follows a talking grey heron into a tower to find his dead mother and a great-uncle balancing a world on stacked stones (2023)
The Boy and the Heron — won him a second Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2024.
Quick-fire facts
- •He co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 with Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki; the name comes from an Italian aircraft and the Saharan wind
- •Spirited Away (2001) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2002, shared with Bloody Sunday
- •He did not attend the 2003 Oscars, in protest at the invasion of Iraq
- •The Boy and the Heron (2023) won him a second Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2024, making him at 83 the oldest winner of the award
- •He received an Honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2014
- •Joe Hisaishi has scored almost every Miyazaki feature since Nausicaä
- •His father's firm made rudders for the Mitsubishi Zero, the fighter whose designer Jiro Horikoshi is the subject of The Wind Rises (2013)
- •Spirited Away was the highest-grossing film in Japanese history for nineteen years, until Demon Slayer: Mugen Train in 2020
- •The Ghibli Museum opened in Mitaka, Tokyo, in 2001, and the Ghibli Park in Aichi Prefecture in 2022
- •He has announced his retirement repeatedly since the 1990s and returned each time; as of 2026 Studio Ghibli has confirmed he is working on another feature
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- British Film Institute — Where to begin with Studio Ghibli
- Bloomberg — Japan's Famed Studio Ghibli Is in No Rush to Make Another Movie