Beautiful complexity

We are living in the age of “Ghibli-fication.” On social media, photos of people, pets, skylines, and even breakfast plates are being transformed into scenes from a Studio Ghibli film. These images are bathed in soft pastels, filtered through nostalgia, and alive with quiet magic. AI tools are fueling the trend, but what’s truly driving it is hunger. Specifically, a hunger for beauty, gentleness, and the kind of wonder that Ghibli has delivered for 40 years.

Studio Ghibli began in 1985 with an ambitious dream: reviving Japanese animation. The founders named their studio “Ghibli” after an Italian word for desert wind. It was meant to symbolize the spark they hoped to ignite.

“Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki formed a visionary trio whose influence reshaped not only Japanese animation but the global storytelling landscape,” said Takeo Suzuki, executive director of the Center for Global Education at the University of Tennessee and an expert on Japanese anime. “They elevated anime into a powerful medium capable of addressing complex themes—environmentalism, pacifism, aging, and identity—with emotional depth, artistic integrity, and resilience.”

The trio didn’t just rattle the industry. They rewrote its future. Over four decades, Ghibli has redefined Japanese animation and created some of the most unforgettable animated films ever made.

At a time when animation often talks down to its audience or packages morality in sterile binaries, Ghibli’s stories live in the gray, resist easy answers, and embrace ambiguity. They don’t offer answers; they pose questions that linger. What does it mean to be truly alive in a mechanized world? Can war ever be justified? What do we owe each other as human beings?

In Princess Mononoke, there are no true villains. In Spirited Away, growth happens not through heroism but humility. These are not children’s stories. They are human stories, hand-drawn with care, and grounded in reality even when they soar through the fantastical. That’s why Ghibli is being reimagined, reposted, and relived by a new generation.

Although Ghibli films are not Christian in origin, their moral imagination frequently reflects a Christian understanding of the human experience. People are never just heroes or villains. They’re fractured, capable of both beauty and betrayal—worthy of love, yet in need of grace.

In Ghibli’s world, no character is purely evil, and no struggle is purely external. Susan Napier, a professor of literary and cultural studies at Tufts University, says the studio’s films are, by design, “morally complex.” They “contain almost no evil characters per se but rather complicated characters with complex stories and motivations.”

Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke. Courtesy of Studio Ghibli

Napier has spent over a decade researching Japanese anime and comics (manga). She says one of the clearest examples of the unintended consequences often featured in Ghibli stories is Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, the formidable leader of the iron foundry known as Tataraba. Napier draws a sharp contrast between Ghibli’s approach and Hollywood’s tendency toward black-and-white moralizing.

“In a Hollywood film, she would simply be an evil, ruthless character bent on destroying nature for her own pleasure, as exemplified by the arrogant evil big-game hunter Clayton in Disney’s Tarzan,” Napier said. But Eboshi defies that mold. “Eboshi has developed the foundry not because she wanted to destroy nature but to give work and meaning to a variety of society’s outcasts.” The cost, she notes, is part and parcel of the industrial revolution itself: “Technology offers many benefits to humans but upends and deforms the environment around us.”

In other words, Ghibli doesn’t ask viewers to root blindly for one side over another. It asks them to pay attention—to see how pride, fear, or love shapes a person’s choices. But as Christians, we know that doesn’t mean good and evil are relative. They are real, and they matter. What Ghibli gets right is that evil often hides in the ordinary, and good can emerge in the most broken of people.

A scene from The Wind Rises. Courtesy of Studio Ghibli

That refusal to simplify is what gives Ghibli its emotional depth. Even in The Wind Rises, which follows a young man whose elegant aircraft designs are eventually used for war, viewers aren’t given a clean verdict. Instead, they are asked to wrestle with the reality unfolding before them: The planes are beautiful. The consequences are horrific. Is it wrong to build something sublime if it will later be used for destruction? Where Disney seeks to reassure, Ghibli encourages viewers to reckon with and recognize that, more often than not, there are no easy answers to profound questions.

And then there is flight, which appears repeatedly in Ghibli films—not just for visual effect, but as something far more personal. For the trio raised in the shadow of war, flight carries the weight of memory and the ache of escape. Their aircraft aren’t just machines; they’re conduits of emotion, vessels of grief, freedom, and guilt. In many ways, flight encapsulates everything Ghibli stands for: love and loss, progress and nostalgia, escape and return. A character takes flight not simply to flee but to understand the world from above, to see its contradictions more clearly. To dream with one foot still planted on the ground.