STUDIO GHIBLI

Studio Ghibli Inc. (Japanese: 株式会社スタジオジブリ, Hepburn: Kabushiki-gaisha Sutajio Jiburi)[1] is a Japanese animation studio headquartered in Koganei, Tokyo.[2] It is best known for its animated feature films, and has also produced several short subjects, television commercials, and two television films. 

The landmark sequence that gave Ghibli a lot of its most memorable iconography hasn’t lost any of its power. My Neighbor Totoro is a charming children’s fantasy that slips comfortably between the mundane world and the spirit world, as young sisters Satsuki and Mei encounter blobby, furry forest spirits that often seem alien, but are entirely benign. In Totoro’s most lyrical sequence — which is really saying something, in a movie so full of memorable moments — the sisters try to meet their father’s bus during a rainstorm, so they can hand him an umbrella as he gets home. But he’s late, and the wait drags on past a cheery late afternoon and into a tenebrous night. Then a familiar giant creature shows up, waiting for its own bus. Everything about this sequence is delightful: the familiar way Mei turns from a ball of restless energy into a cranky, sleepy dead weight. The dozy look on Totoro’s face as he waits for the bus. His bearish curiosity over Satsuki’s umbrella. The sheer delight he takes in the noise of rain hitting it, and his outsized response. The gently plodding score, which conjures up the feeling of this great dozy beast operating at a different pace from the humans he meets. So much of Ghibli’s work is about encounters with magic, whether that means actual legendary creatures of power, or the simple magic of engine-powered flight or sunlight in a field. My Neighbor Totoro reliably mixes fantasy wonder with ordinary child wonder, and finds them both equally marvelous, but never more so than in the rain sequence

When human protagonist Chihiro invites a spirit called No Face into the yokai bathhouse where she’s working, he goes on a rampage, devouring everything in sight (including her co-workers) until she feeds him a magic healing dumpling that makes him vomit it all up again. Cue several minutes of frantic chasing, as he simultaneously dissolves into goo and pukes up voluminous waves of gunk. She takes it all in stride because she’s entirely focused on something else — a journey to meet a witch and save a friend. So the crowded, rococo busyness of the bathhouse’s interior, and all the dark and grotesque miasma of No Face’s sickness abruptly gives way to pure, serene blue, as Chihiro escapes the bathhouse, walks along flooded train tracks to a station that’s nothing more than a concrete slab in the middle of a ceaseless ocean, and boards a train full of shapeless, shadowy ghosts. Joe Hisaishi’s gentle piano score here does powerful work of setting a tone of contemplative peace after a whole lot of hullabaloo. This entire movie is a journey for Chihiro, but this sequence makes that literal, capturing both the excitement of heading into a new place and the wistfulness of leaving an old one, not to mention the peaceable state of being between spaces, with nothing to do but wait and take in the shifting scenery.

Grave of the Fireflies opens with a teenage boy dying of starvation, segues into the firebombing of Kobe, Japan, and somehow still ends with the most heartbreaking scene in the film (and maybe all of Studio Ghibli history): the celebration of a young life lost. Four-year-old Setsuko is a bundle of joy, even after her mother is killed. She finds beauty in a bomb-shelter hideout, and savors meager meals alongside her big brother Seita. The audience might hope that everything will be all right — but they know from the movie’s opening scene that it won’t be. Setsuko eventually dies from malnutrition, and as her spirit fades, director Isao Takahata cues a soft soprano elegy in her name. The music plays over scenes of Setsuko at her most innocent, crafting, pretending, and running amok in the grass. The cost of war is not just life, Takahata tells us with elegiac grace, but life that could have been.