A love letter to Studio Ghibli
Article Table of Contents
- Studio Ghibli
- Kiki’s Delivery Service
- Ponyo
- My Neighbor Totoro
- Howl’s Moving Castle
- Additional Reading
- Footnotes
I’ve had a bunch of notes floating around related to Studio Ghibli, a production studio started by Hayao Miyazaki.
If you like movies, or have kids, and have not yet encountered Studio Ghibli, you’re welcome. I first encountered Studio Ghibli in 2020. Their first film was released in 1984, there’s now 22 films they’ve made. I’ve seen nearly all of them.
Studio Ghibli #
first written sometime in 2024
I brought this over from a page of recommended books.
I didn’t even hear of Studio Ghibli until I was quite old, and am now happily working on watching the entire 25 piece anthology. I’ve seen more than half.
As you might imagine, there’s lots kids love about these pieces.
A little history #
Studio Ghibli is a production studio that made/makes animated movies, starting in 1984, based in Japan. It’s refreshingly non-western. Haio Miyazaki was the founder/director. I’ve ahem managed to find a collection of all the works with the original japanese audio and english subtitles. For movies I’ll watch and rewatch with Eden, I’ve usually ended up torrenting the movie so I can have the file, easily accessible, no streaming service required.
Noteworthy starting points could be Kiki’s Delivery Service, Pom Poko, My Neighbor Totoro, Tale of Princess Kaguya.
I, personally, usually prefer them in the original japanese, with english subtitles.
But I’ve now mostly see them with english language tracks, with eden.
Amazon Prime has one version of Totoro, as my toddler-aged kid calls it, and the wayback machine/archive.org has an older english dub for free. I bought the Amazon one, and ended up torrenting the same file, just to save bandwidth on the many times we’ve seen the movie.
I’m exploring finding good english dubs for the best ones, turns out there are plenty of good-enough ones. Some I’ve paid for, some I’ve found for free, sometimes both. There’s at least one Studio Ghibli that doesn’t have any spoken words, so the audio is available in every language. It is a bit slow, and when Eden and I watched it, we skipped through most of it, and it didn’t get slotted for a re-watch like Kiki’s Delivery Service or Howl’s Moving Castle.
HBO Max has a lot of studio ghibli. I agree with Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, thus after suffering through HBO max and forced english dubs and UI changes for a while, I ‘gave up’ and torrented at least some of the entire collection, so I can have fine-grained control over subtitles and audio tracks via vlc, and didn’t have to navigate crappy smart TV menus again.
I usually look up the movie on Wikipedia before I watch it, to help contextualize/orient myself to time/place/context in which the movie was created.
Here’s a piece from the BBC that gives a brief introduction to every Ghibli piece.
Kiki’s Delivery Service #
I jotted down some notes about this movie last time I watched it with my kid, she was ~3.5 years old when we first watched this together.
Here’s the trailer:
It’s available via the pirate bay, or sometimes various streaming services. I’ve been able to now get good copies of all the Ghibli films Eden likes to see.
Eden loves this movie, and so do I. One of my favorite aspects of the movie is that the depictions of cities is stunning, beautiful.
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it contains moving motifs about a coming-of-age young person
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the part with birds, Eden and I skip, and the dirigible part at the end. It’s a bit intense, and she reminds me (when we’re starting the movie) that we’ll skip those parts.
it’s about a very independent, earnest kid being treated well-enough, helped, cared for, by the people around her.
no one betrays, tries to kill, or fabricates an evil, violent creature to attack someone’s family. (looking at you, Frozen)
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the aunt person (the painter in the woods) is so useful in the story.
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so few engines are heard in the entire movie. Normalized alternative modes of transport: walking, using a broomstick (which functions like a sky scooter?), or creative leg-powered vehicles, electric street cars.
- no normalization of abuse or power dynamic exploitation (looking at you, Frozen.)
- no tanks, war planes, bombs, guns, police (mostly, and the main interaction with a police officer involves him getting tricked), military, teachers, school conflict, bedtimes.
look at the cobblestone streets!
Look at the streetcars!
I get sometimes viscerally angry that something like this is possible, but American zoning/urban renewal/ethnic cleansing programs have caused cities to look like the normal american city - wide roads, parking lots everywhere, endless strip malls, soullesness, death. That many kids movies normalizes this form of urban design is sad.
- it’s about a young girl starting and running a business, not at all interested or obsessed w/love interests. It aces the Bechdel test, in like ten different ways, in contrast to literally every movie made by Disney
I’ve written about the outsides of the buildings, the beautiful streets and buildings, but of course Studio Ghibli delivers beautiful interiors as well:
Here’s how Denver looks. I find it alternatively sad and angering that anyone expects anyone else to take shit like this seriously. American cities, under the guidance of supremacists/decendents of european americans, are car gutters and parking lots:
Do you know what used to exist, before these parking lots?
The above satellite view of Denver depicts American-style ethnic cleansing. Americans would rather slaughter/destroy/exterminate an environment than allow that some other way of being is permissible.
Reference Agent Orange in Vietnam The bombing of Black Wallstreet in Tulsa, Oklahoma R1 and R2 ‘race zoning’ designations.1 The state-sponsored extermination of the American Bison to ‘force the Indian onto the reservation’. 2 the current, ongoing genocide of the people living in Palestine.
Here’s what could be:
Ponyo #
Delightful. Wikipedia entry for Ponyo (2008). The literal title is Ponyo on the Cliff.
The english dubs are great, I thought, and there is only one english dub floating around out there. My evaluation of at least one toddler’s experience of the movie (on the first, second, n-th experience) is that she very much likes it, and it engages a lot of her imagination and enjoyment, at least in the ways we’ve experienced it.
My Neighbor Totoro #
My Neighbor Totoro (wikipedia)
I think my daughter watched it first at ~2.5 years old, sat enraptured almost the whole way, we spoke about it extensively after.
The file I torrented only included the original audio, which isn’t helpful for an english-speaking toddler, even though she’s gotten along pretty well in japanese-language movies, or with me voicing via subtitles a bit.
I think the best english audio is what I’ve found on Amazon prime - $4 to rent, $16 to buy:
https://www.amazon.com/My-Neighbor-Totoro-English-Language/dp/B08123SMCH
I also found a different english dub online for free, but really dislike the voices, and find it unwatchable:
https://archive.org/details/totoro-fox-dub
The latter voices the toddler in diminishing, stereotyped ways, and the dad’s voice feels equally mis-fitting to the context, while the amazon dub feels ‘right’.
OK, here’s how I got the file with the right audio, so I can just cmd+space (open alfred) [space]my n[tab][return] file-search query my n focus first result, default open file in vlc.
Eden learned this routine with the Grinch (she really liked the 2018 version, as did I, watched it many times, knows it takes no time at all to get playing. I really like the theme song, and it has lots of clever moments that )
the search I ran to get the options: https://thepiratebay3.co/s/?q=my+neighbor+totoro
what I ended up downloading:
My Neighbor Totoro - Streamline - FOX English Dub.mp4 (update nvm, wrong dub, don’t love this one)
Howl’s Moving Castle #
Howl’s Moving Castle, released in 2004, is nice. Strong anti-war themes, reflect’s Miyazaki’s opposition to the American Empire attacking Iraq in 2003. Wikipedia.
I’d like to read the novel it’s based on some day.
Can be watched for free with english dubs (and downloaded) here on the Internet Archive
Additional Reading #
Footnotes #
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Some of you know about residence zoning designations in the USA. Or, at least, that’s what I thought the R1, single family homes, r2, multi family homes designation meant.
Residence zones imply, definitionally, commercial and industrial designations as well. Unfortunately ‘residence zoning’ was not the original intent of r1/r2 zoning. The person that first wrote up these designations did it in 1922, and wrote ‘race zoning: r1 - white, r2 - col*red, r3 - undecided’, and those designations persist in every. single. american. city. today. some cities have ‘improved’ the concept to ‘use zones’, ‘form zone overlays’, and/or ‘form types’. This all was first popularized
The Atlanta Zone Plan, I did a fairly detailed write-up/re-print/signal-boost, as it seemed/seems like a crucial piece of history, from a forensic/action perspective.Any zoning expert in America who knows this history of american zoning (one doesn’t imply the other) knows that american zoning became law in Euclid v. Ambler, 1926.
Here’s a PDF of the supreme court ruling, from the Library of Congress. Here’s some quotes:
On November 13, 1922, an ordinance was adopted by the Village Council, establishing a comprehensive zoning plan for regulating and restricting the location of trades, industries, apartment houses, two-family houses, single family houses, etc., the lot area to be built upon, the size and height of buildings, etc. The entire area of the village is divided by the ordinance into six classes of use districts, denominated U-1 to U-6, inclusive; three classes of height districts, denominated H-1 to H-3, inclusive; and four classes of area districts, denominated A-1 to A-4, inclusive.
This is a direct reference to that 1922 ‘atlanta zone plan’. here is a link to that exact text from the Atlanta Zone Plan. Read in the mayor of Atlanta’s own words his desires for residence districts and race zoning!!! That document got encoded, as is, into law.
Note that the discussion of ‘apartment houses’ is a dogwhistle for “those kind of people” or “non-white people”. From page 30 of Euclid v. Ambler, 1926 (library of congress/supreme court ruling) PDF:
With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bring- ing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities,-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed.
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this paper, THE FRONTIER ARMY AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BUFFALO:1865-1883 a good starting point for the tactic that european american descendants/colonialists used to destroy the plains indians. These kinds of people were given awards, lauded, and their ways of being were copied/pasted across this land:
both civil and military officials concerned with the Indian problem applauded the slaughter, for they correctly perceived it a crucial factor that would force the Indian onto the reservation.
Phil Sheridan had finally gained control of the Shenandoah Valley,the Journal recalled, by laying “waste the grain fields – the supply of food and forage to the enemy –and it was like robbing the Indian of his buffalo.”As long as the buffalo roamed in great herds the plains tribes would spurn the reservations.
Hence, according to the Journal,”to campaign against the buffalo would be, if successful, not only to destroy the enemy’s supplies, but to put the whole casus belli out of existence by annihilation.