Studio Ghibli, Mental Health and Falling in Love with Being Alive
Like many of us during this pandemic, I’ve found myself leaning back on digital media as a source of comfort and inspiration. Additionally, with the fact that I’m back in my childhood bedroom, answering Zoom call after Zoom call, I’ve also found myself regressing into my childhood psyche, delving into the persona of the person I was when I last occupied this space. I rewatched shows that I hadn’t looked back on in years, reconnecting with all of the media that at one point or another had essentially compromised my identity. And in doing so, I found my way to Studio Ghibli.
Just vocalising the name itself conjures up these immense feelings of wonder, adventure, warmth, and love for me. Over the last few weeks, I’ve rewatched so many of these films back to back and have fallen more and more enchanted with each world. They made me feel so happy, and I do not use that word lightly, in a way in which very few other pieces of media that I’ve consumed have managed to do. They made me look at the sky with renewed fascination and interest, had me staring at the way my coffee dripped from its filter into my cup, admiring golden beams of light as they danced on my floor. Dare I say… they even made me do the anime thing. All in all, I realised that watching these films had given me this sort of… shifted perspective, a renewed engagement with and appreciation for the world around me.
Consequently, I started re-engaging with it online and stumbled upon this text post.
I read this and I was speechless. That’s it; that’s the perfect articulation of how I feel after I watch these films. They’ve helped me find joy in my day-to-day — a mental health boost, almost training me to better appreciate my life.
But why? What is so unique about the Studio Ghibli blueprint that produces this reaction that judging from the post, has been echoed by many other fans globally?
For those of you who haven’t heard of Studio Ghibli, it’s an internationally renowned animation company from Japan co-founded by the honestly quite legendary Hayao Miyazaki. Some of their most popular works include Oscar-winning Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbour Totoro, Ponyo, and many other titles. Ghibli has been a frequent topic of discussion online with many publications racing to be the first to update with reviews and essays. When it was announced earlier this year that the movies were going to be shown on Netflix (except for in the U.S.) the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, taking over as the main topic of discussion on many platforms.
These films have so much hard work and love poured into them and it shows. Even for viewers who aren't familiar with animation and especially animation outside of the west, the eye for detail and thought given to every element from music composition to colouring is glaring and moving. The films are mostly all hand-drawn first of all (with exceptions for being Miyazaki’s son Goro who is working on titles with computer-drawn animation), for which Hayao Miyazaki himself has stated is something he wishes for the studio to maintain. For their upcoming feature, How do You Live? Hayao Miyazaki has insisted on keeping to the tradition of hand-drawn animation. In a recent interview to Entertainment Weekly, Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki said,
“[For] the current film that Hayao Miyazaki is working on, we have 60 animators, but we are only able to come up with one minute of animation in a month. That means 12 months a year, you get 12 minutes worth of movie. Actually, we’ve been working on this film for three years, so that means we have 36 minutes completed so far. We’re hoping it will finish in the next three years.”
And it shows. 1 month for 1 minute — several hours poured over each frame, the care and thought given is evident and it often makes for a stronger product. Similarly, Hayao Miyazaki’s traditionalist views extend to that of his ideal animator. To Entertainment Weekly in 2005, he said,
“When we were [animating Calcifer, a fire demon], some staff said they had never seen wood burning. I said, Go watch! It has disappeared from their daily lives. Japanese baths used to be made by burning firewood. Now you press a button. I don’t think you can become an animator if you don’t have any experience.”
And you can tell. The way in which the characters do simple daily tasks such as cooking, and even in the way the walk — they feel almost more like a live study of human behaviour than animation — or perhaps, it is because they are animated that they are able to depict life in a more communicative way than live-action. These are films with so much heart; they’re romantic. They’re real but they’re also magical and not necessarily in the ‘fantasy’ use of the term — and this is important.
A lot of the animated films we’ve become accustomed to deal with fantasy on quite a grand scale, think Disney with magic princesses or Dreamworks with Rise of the Guardians, and so on. They’re all still escapist films at heart; they serve to impress and draw you away from life and into his world of grandeur and possibility. However, this is not Ghibli. I believed at first that my love for these films was tied to the way they allowed me to escape from my reality, however, I now believe its something of the antonym.
“Where Disney seeks to impress with the opulence of scale and blissfully escapist glamour (think bewitchingly beautiful princesses, operatic songs, almost demonic villains), Ghibli seeks out what’s relatable even in the extraordinary, tries to make a mark in more subtle ways, not through escapism but through its polar opposite really, through well-crafted realism.” Source
And this is a brilliant articulation of what I experienced— the feeling that my reality itself had been blurred with the reality presented in Ghibli’s films, and consequently, mine had become more captivating.
A video essay by Hello Future Me explores the use of “Hard worldbuilding vs soft worldbuilding” in Studio Ghibli and comparative fantasy fiction examples. In the essay, the creator explains that Studio Ghibli films often utilise the technique of soft worldbuilding through soft magic systems. Hard worldbuilding is exemplified by works such as Lord of The Rings with a detailed language within the world, fleshed-out characters — rich, structured worldbuilding. This is a grounded, logical world enabling the reader to better visualise and immerse themselves in the story. Soft world building on the other hand is subtle, relying largely on inference to communicate aspects of the world to the reader. It's less rigid and this is reflected in fewer explicitly communicated laws, politics, world demographics being explained to the reader however, it is no less immersive. In the video, this is explored using the example of Ghibli’s most notable film Spirited Away.
In Spirited Away, the main character Chihiro and her family happen upon a town tied deeply to the spiritual realm. In this town, her parents consume the spirits’ food — offerings we can only assume, an homage of sorts to a type of forbidden fruit — upon which as punishment for their greed they are cursed to be pigs. Consequently, young Chihiro then goes into the spiritual realm, working in a bathhouse that services many spirits of this realm.
There is no dialogue or scene dedicated to exposition that explains this — it is for the viewer to follow, observe, and infer. Take for example one of the key scenes in which Chihiro pulls out a thorn from the side of an ominous, feared spirit. In doing so, a flood of trash and garbage pours out of the spirit, from which a river spirit emerges and flies out.
As Hello Future Me analyses, it is the combination of the visuals provided — a key being the observation that much of the trash pouring out of the spirit such as the bicycle is manmade — and the reverent reaction of the other spirits in the scene that enables us to make conclusions about the world. “From this, we imagine a world in which spirits are corrupted by the world of mankind”. Combined with subtle elements such as the spirits detesting the smell of humans, the viewer is left to create their own sense of the world following the sparse guidelines given by the film. Similarly, we are taking throughout the many layers of the bathhouse itself — rarely told, but rather, shown aspects such as the workers’ quarters, the furnace, dining areas, and so on. The film slowly peels back layers of the world but not necessarily with an order or explicit intention, rather it lets things unravel, building a half-sense of the world such as that which we possess as children. This world already exists, and rather than poking or prodding at it to provide an explanation for itself, we are given the ability to learned through experience, consequently building a perhaps fragmented almost random sense of the world, but this makes it surprisingly all the more realistic. Miyazaki himself says, “there are more profound things than logic that guide the story.” In essence, with softer systems, the world is allowed to be less governed that makes each film more alluring and easier to fall into. They are not constrained within a border or frame like other notable fantasy worlds of Tolkein or Rowling wherein their worlds exist in isolation — they are places you visit but eventually leave. Ghibli does not provide the viewer with an extensive list of spells or canonically consistent ingredients for potions, nor do the films articulate huge insights into magical politics. A Ghibli viewer is not given several layers meticulous exposition to absorb instead, the viewer is invited into each realm as a traveler to learn and experience, as you often would when visiting any other place in the real world.
There’s another video, “The Immersive Realism of Ghibli” by Asher Isburcker that ties soft worldbuilding to a sense of realism that serves as more grounding and immersive than the use of Hard worldbuilding. Isbuckers observes, “no matter how far-fetched and imaginary the story, the world of a Ghibli film consistently feels tactile and realistic” through the well-crafted balance constructed between fantasy and reality. Even in a fantasy film like Spirited Away, Ghibli steps back from the grand magic and takes time to implement realism. One of the key ways this is done is through attention to movement. Each character moves with purpose, even background characters and bystanders in the scene move from place to place with intention, as though they were real individuals who just happened to spatially coincide with our protagonist on a given day. Furthermore, the movement of each main character is detailed and extremely well-thought-out. Emotions are conveyed through the way a character walks and runs — desperation, excitement, fear, whilst also maintaining the attributes of each character such as their age in the way they put on their shoes or stumble in their runs. With Ghibli films, the realism of these stories makes them feel like they could exist somewhere in our world, a real place beyond the scope of the film. It begins before you get there, and continues onwards, even outside of the character’s themselves like in Spirited Away.
Ghibli’s ability to bring reality to fantasy is well evidenced and Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle however, I would like to briefly explore the inverse of how Ghibli also brings fantasy to its more realistic, slice-of-life based features.
Whisper of the Heart is a heart-warming exploration of adolescence and childhood dreams through the eyes of our protagonist, 14 to 15-year-old Shizuku Tsukishima. The Wikipedia page describes this film as a sweet summer romance but this description does not do it justice — Whisper of the Heart is about the endeavour to find passion and meaning in life and challenging oneself to achieve one's most precious dreams. I think for any creatives, this film speaks volumes, deeply articulating a search we’ve all undertaken and are still journeying on. The story begins with Shizuku, an avid reader, visiting the library where her dad works. While there she realises that someone else — a mysterious boy — has been checking out the exact same books as her. She fantasises about who this perfect intellectual match of hers could be and when she finally does meet him by chance — he’s not what she expected. But, their meeting presents her with something better than an idealised romance. He’s a talented artisan who has been crafting violins since childhood and already has a dream, with an apprenticeship and budding career lined up. Shizuku is happy for him… but suddenly shes acutely aware of falling behind in regards to her own future. She realises she wants to write but is afraid she won't be good enough — which, felt like my deepest fears said out loud. In the end, she tries anyway and the product is by no means a masterpiece, but she learns from it and grows and knows what she needs to do next. She has the confirmation she needs to follow her heart.
The film features a story within a story, showing an ornate clock and telling us the magical story behind it. The clock depicts a tragic romance between a king and a fairy, bringing in explicit romantic themes to the story. The film from this point onwards is quite explicit in linking artisanship to a kind of magic, embedding fantasy within the creative process throughout the film. This scene also links magic with love, both in love for creating and romantic love for those around. The animation here also contributes to this tone, with characters visually sparkling like they themselves are alive with some spiritual energy.
The way we get to this scene is also important. Shizuku is walking home from school and she gets distracted by a cat, following it through inner roads and… that's about it. Ghibli consistently juxtaposes characters’ arrival at the scenes of their grand adventures and plot climaxes with often mundane, every-day means embedded in the real world. There are also other literary themes at play here — walking off the beaten path for her creative passion, ‘country road’ both being the road shes physically walking along and also a lonely journey in finding her creative endeavor, as she articulates in her translation of the song.
The film’s storyboarding is also a beautiful testament to the power of animation as a medium of intense expression. In the way a book lets you into a character’s head, animation allows you to experient their emotional state through the environment. In many scenes of passive action where Shizuku is simply walking to another destination, the heaviness of her emotions is felt through the movement of the clouds, the colouring of the sky, and the allowance of the film to show us the passage of time. She does not quickly move from one moment in her life to the next — she transitions and these often lonely depictions of her transitioning serve as a wonderful visual of the film's message. The vastness of the sky conveys a depth and sense of wonder with this world with the world as well, where Shizuku often feels small in the face of it. Yet still, the shifting nature of the scenes and the environment gives the world around her life, it gives each scene of inaction a buzz of life and magic, suggesting that though this may be a lonely transition, it is still exciting and worthwhile.
Additionally, scenes from real life such as riding the metro have been given long moments of screentime allowing the animators to enrich the scenes, depicting moments such as when the cart shakes every so gently over a particular rail, midday light flickering and shining in through the glass, all-in-all creating a moment though derived from the reality that feels like a special isolated moment in time. There’s magic in that — this feeling of escaping reality yet still being grounded within the world. And again, so much of this film and many of Ghibli’s other films don’t just move characters scene to scene — they show them walking to a location, the progress of the thoughts and emotions of the character as they explore their own world and this brings their world, whether realistic or fantasy, to life, juxtaposing magic with realism.
Furthermore, the use of the landscape and the way it changes throughout the film as a means of insight into the character’s headspace elevates the importance of the environment throughout the film. This is turn causes the viewer to subconsciously pay more attention to it, training us, in essence, to absorb the scene as a whole. This combined with the realistic setting in the film causes us by extension to apply a similar emphasis on our own environment. You come out of it with this sense of renewed perception but the elements of realism ground you in reality, and allow that subversion to the reality around you and your life.
Even the end card with the shot of the path depicting so many different people walking by is powerful in its own subdued way. We see many different people — individuals, walking, running, living their lives in the same way we’ve just seen our protagonists do throughout the film. It concluded the film with the sense that everyone is going through their own story and journey and it essentially ties everything in this world with ours in the most beautiful, romantic, and magical way.
This combination of immersive realism alongside elements of romanticism and fantasy serves as a blueprint for many of Ghibli’s films, contributing to their success of enchanting and embedding within the hearts of its viewers.
Naturally, a lot of critics attribute the thought process behind these techniques to Hayao Miyazaki’s personal creative philosophy. Brenden C. Walsh published a paper titled “A Modern-Day Romantic: The Romantic Sublime in Hayao Miyazaki’s Creative Philosophy” exploring this. One of the aspects Walsh highlights is how Miyazaki implements the romantic sublime in his filmography. The sublime in literary criticism has a very fluid definition; “grandeur of thought, emotion, and spirit that characterizes great literature”. What Walsh does is constrict is this definition to refer to ‘the sublime’ originating from European Romanticism and explores sub-manifestation of this philosophy as the Romantic Sublime. Walsh goes in further detail to the manifestation of the sublime through magic, observing Miyazaki’s use of magic and a method to explore “living” spiritual power in their environment and as a means to illustrate the relationship between humans and the natural realm. The characters seeking and exhibiting magic is Miyazaki’s way of visualising their relationship with the sublime and by extension to the natural world. This is why Ghibli films regardless of being based in fantasy or reality still have a thrum of life that's captivating to the viewer and why in turn these films reflect in our own relationships to our surroundings.
This is the part where I overshare a little, just as a treat. I believe Studio Ghibli has helped me immensely with my mental health. A lot of the things I’ve outlined thus far — immersive realism and the sublime, serve to embed elements of spirituality and fantasy into our reality. In doing so, Ghibli films communicate across somewhat of a demonstration of how to enjoy life by first finding magic in your environment. I’m not saying watching one film will fix your depression, (it didn't fix mine), but the continuous use of these tools and devices drummed in overtime — I believe — really do contribute to giving the viewer an overall mental boost.
This is done in some of the more subtle and nuanced ways I described but also, explicitly in action and dialogue.
Ghibli takes the time to explore mental health issues right from adolescence — and takes them seriously. They aren't treated as just a character flaw or as a centerpiece to their entire identity but rather, as aspects of the character that develop and progress with them. They’re just a part of the characters’ lives, and that in turn, for myself at least, began to hammer in this sense that it can and will get better. Though it may feel like it, what I am going through is not necessarily a terminal affliction. It is a partner that will be with me for perhaps the rest of your life; a constant, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a burden. The characters move forth with their lives and so will we.
When Marnie Was There is one of the more explicit Ghibli films in depicting mental health issues that I unfortunately don’t see talked about enough. It’s a deep, rich story that explores themes of isolation, friendship, and family. Anna is a child who suffers from anxiety and depression and she’s biracial, which we see results in her alienation in her surrounding community. She moves to the countryside and finds solace in another girl Marnie — who’s sometimes there, sometimes not. Marnie is also a survivor of abuse both physical and emotional at the hands of her caretakers and this is explored quite explicitly in the film. There are elements of fantasy that shroud their meetings — it’s evident that they take place outside of reality, and spoiler alert, Marnie is dead and has been for quite a while. However, this doesn’t change the significance of the bond these two have developed — it’s real for them and that’s important enough.
Tying those elements of sublime and magic the film juxtaposes horrific realities of depression, racism, child abuse, with several moments of beauty and warmth and kindness. It does what Ghibli does best — it gives the viewer strength and hope. For the characters, their connection to each other makes them stronger and able to persist, for us, it’s our connection to them. We explore love and hope and loss through them and it teaches us — sometimes subconsciously — how to love and hope ourselves. These films are wishful — and as a consequence, they train us to be wishful and optimistic and excited by life.
If you’ve watched many Ghibli films, you’ll notice a common theme amongst them, namely the use of children as the main characters or protagonists. When the child is a storyteller, we are less guarded to their narrative. We acknowledge that they have a limited perception of the world but we don’t necessarily code that negatively — we don’t assume malicious intent. This makes us more vulnerable to the child storyteller.
I think a lot of us sometimes are more moved or receptive regarding stories about marality when they come through the perspective of children and consequently, everything we absorb is heightened. Our vulnerability to their narratives makes their trauma that much more tragic, their adventures all the more wonderful and grand, and their love and joy all the more innocent and moving. This is all intentional — magic and fantasy are things that we typically associate with our childhoods. It’s a global perception in our society that adults tend to be associated with skepticism, a sort of tired realism, or even cynicism that just doesn’t always pair well with being the vessel for these type of stories. Children on the other hand connote innocence and wonder and purity — in the sense that their emotions feel purer, less trained, or shaped by society or their experience.
Naturally, we speak best to those who are like us; adults to adults, and children to children. And by speak I don’t just mean communication — I mean comprehension and understanding. These films through their storytellers speak to our inner child and hence, embed and connect with us in a way a lot of other films (in my opinion) do not. And it’s purposeful — Miyazaki chooses children to be the protagonist of his stories, intentionally creating stories that may be incomprehensible at our initial time of viewing, but carry intense and impactful messages and realisations for us later on in life.
In an interview to the Japan Times, Miyazaki says.
“I want to create films through which children can see and experience something new. I want to make that one unforgettable film in everyone’s childhood, something they can enjoy for at least 30 years.” Source
“Miyazaki has said “Utopia exists only in one’s childhood life,” and believes it is becoming more and more difficult to reach out to children’s souls because of increasing consumerism and the virtual world. Television, video games, email, mobile phones, and manga are sapping children of their strength, he worries.”
“Rather than looking at how to stimulate domestic demand by building bridges or roads, we should provide a proper environment for our future generations because children are Japan’s best investment.” Source.
This is where that initial post comes back in. These films, by speaking to other children and to the child in our past, remind us that alongside harshness life also brings beauty and joy and love.
Ultimately, what Studio Ghibli does most expertly is animate i.e. bring to life their characters and stories from the bottom up. There’s this duality in the narrative of these films in that the characters still carry on doing their grand, fantastical things in their stunning, mesmerising adventures, but the conception and the direction of these films always stop to highlight the small, the continuous, and the easily overlooked elements of life and makes them feel beautiful.
Ghibli constructs a narrative in which the smaller simpler things in life can be grand. Life can be beautiful; and perhaps that is reason enough to bear through it.
