Ghibli and the quiet continuity of 1990s Japan
I imagine walking towards the Ghibli offices through a quiet Japanese suburb. It is an ordinary morning. A bicycle passes, its rider making a small adjustment to give me room. Beyond a low wall, branches hang over the pavement. There are houses with things left outside because people live in them: a watering can, a pair of shoes, something drying in the pale sunlight. Somewhere along this imagined walk, a temple entrance opens between buildings. The street carries on around it. I notice how easily the old trees and the everyday business of the neighbourhood occupy the same space.
I take my time. That is part of the scene, perhaps the part I need most. Eventually I would reach the studio in Koganei, where people have spent years making drawings move. For now, I am content with the approach. I like the thought that an extraordinary body of work can emerge from a place reached by an unremarkable walk, beneath trees whose growth has continued through every production meeting and every difficult afternoon. Before I arrive, I already feel something easing. The world has become a size I can inhabit again.
The ache of a place that still feels like home
There is a significant part of me that seems permanently attached to 1990s Japan. I have tried to find a more exact way of saying that, but the plain version remains the closest. Something in its imagined and remembered textures belongs to my sense of self. In unguarded moments, the feeling can be almost painfully beautiful. A station sign, a certain arrangement of houses, the colour of an animated afternoon: very little is needed to bring it back. I feel a melancholy that I am comfortable owning. It tells me something about what I love.
When we visit Japan, I notice continuities that make this attachment feel less distant. On public transport, I have found myself looking at clothing, printed information and the lettering around me, thinking how comfortably some of it could belong to the nineties. These are my impressions of particular journeys. They accumulate into a feeling of familiarity, as though everyday life has retained certain proportions that elsewhere have become harder for me to find. A useful thing can remain useful. A familiar appearance can survive another year without apologising for itself. The lettering stays with me in particular. A sign can address a person quietly. It can tell me where to go without seeming to want anything further from me. I notice the difference because so much of the visual world now feels impatient for a response. On those journeys, I sometimes find myself grateful for the simple act of reading something that has been allowed to look familiar. A typeface becomes part of the atmosphere of a place, as ordinary and reassuring as the sound of a door closing.
I love that continuity. I experience it as respect for what already works, for the possibility that a place can develop while keeping some of its recognisable face. Japan is a living country, with people whose experiences are far more complicated than my affection can encompass. Still, there are moments there when I feel unusually close to the calm I want from life. Ghibli has become the clearest artistic expression of that feeling. Its films give a lasting form to qualities I otherwise encounter briefly, on a walk or through the window of a train.
The nineties as an emotional geography
The nineties hold a particular balance in my imagination. Technology had acquired remarkable expressive power, while much of ordinary experience remained physically situated. Entertainment arrived in objects. Information had places where one went to find it. Waiting occupied an appreciable part of the day. I associate that period with a world whose possibilities had widened without every available moment becoming an invitation to consume something else. My affection is inseparable from my own age and formation. The world was reaching me then, and some of the things that reached me stayed. There is a line in the Wachowskis' The Matrix that I return to: Agent Smith describes the simulated world as “the peak of your civilization”. It is dialogue spoken by the film's antagonist, rather than a straightforward declaration of the filmmakers' personal beliefs. Nevertheless, the image has stayed with me. I recognise something in the choice of that late twentieth-century world as the setting in which humanity might be held indefinitely. There was enough complexity to sustain an extraordinary imaginative life, and enough ordinary space for that life to feel one's own.[1]
I also know that 1990s Japan contained suffering. The collapse of the economic bubble, the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack belong to the same decade I associate with quiet streets and beautiful animation. Those realities deserve their own weight. My emotional geography cannot serve as a complete history, and I would never ask someone who endured those years differently to exchange their memories for mine.[2] What I am trying to preserve is a particular relation to time, visible within that period and still available in parts of the present. I call it the perpetual nineties because I recognise it immediately, even when the calendar says otherwise.
Morning transmissions from a recognisable world
Every morning I receive The Ghibli Reporter, a researched account of what is happening around the studio. It begins with the official Japanese announcements and follows the work outwards into screenings, exhibitions, publishing and the lives of the people making it. I asked for this daily ritual because I wanted a regular connection to something that matters to me. I have been surprised by how much comfort can reside in an unexceptional update. A museum prepares for reopening. A book gathers drawings. Someone continues work on an exhibition.
These things reach me almost as transmissions from the real world. By that I mean a world in which I can recognise my own values taking practical form. The report reminds me that, elsewhere in the same present, people are attending to the work itself. There is an audience to welcome, a drawing to reproduce properly, a detail somebody thinks should be right. On days when my surroundings feel strange or dissonant, that knowledge gives me a point of reference. I can turn towards it and remember what steadiness feels like.
I do not need a new masterpiece every morning. I like hearing that the ordinary life surrounding the masterpieces continues.
The feeling is similar to seeing a light on in a familiar house. Someone is there; the place is being looked after. Calling it a lifeline to sanity expresses the relief of that recognition, the pleasure of finding that the things I care about are still being cared for by other people.
The dignity of an ordinary interval
Ghibli's attention to ordinary life runs deep into the films. I think of food being prepared, shoes being put on, a room investigated slowly enough for its objects to acquire a history. In My Neighbour Totoro, the house and its surroundings become familiar through the children's physical curiosity. Whisper of the Heart gives creative ambition a setting of trains, desks, family routines and books. I can believe in these worlds because their inhabitants have somewhere to sit and things to do when the central drama pauses. The films understand that a life extends beyond its most consequential events.
Miyazaki has spoken directly about this use of time. In his interview with Roger Ebert, he explained ma, the interval or space between things, by clapping his hands and directing attention to the time between the claps. He described how breathing room allows a film's tension to expand, and how constant intensity can make an audience numb.[3]
That observation reaches well beyond cinema for me. I can feel the difference between a day that has room inside it and one that simply delivers the next demand. The interval gives experience somewhere to settle.
This is also why the beauty I find in Ghibli can accommodate sadness. Totoro's gentleness exists alongside anxiety about a mother's illness. Porco Rosso carries grief within its affection for flight. Princess Mononoke allows its forest to remain magnificent even when human actions have made reconciliation desperately difficult. I trust an artist who can sustain tenderness under those conditions. His work helps me remain receptive to beauty when I am tired, disappointed or frightened by the direction of things. That receptiveness is a practical resource. It affects how I return to my own day.
Three founders and the conditions of care
My affection for Miyazaki grows when I look at the people around him. The three founders at the centre of Ghibli's creative story are Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki. The studio began in 1985 with the backing of Tokuma Shoten; Yasuyoshi Tokuma's financial and institutional support belongs in any honest account of its survival.[4] Miyazaki's imagination needed colleagues capable of challenging it, translating it into production and finding the means to let the work continue. The studio's existence is one of those achievements whose apparent inevitability increases with hindsight. At the time, another film always had to be made possible.
Takahata matters enormously to the breadth of what Ghibli means. Only Yesterday takes memory and an adult woman's uncertainty seriously. Pom Poko places environmental loss within a strange, unruly collective story. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya gives its images a freedom that feels inseparable from the life struggling inside them. His films keep the studio from resolving into a single emotional register. Remembering him also makes my own language about comfort more precise. The Ghibli I love has room for experiences that hurt, and for forms of beauty that refuse to console easily.
Suzuki's contribution has its own kind of imagination. Production involves the difficult business of securing time, money and trust for something whose value cannot yet be demonstrated in finished form. Ghibli's official history records the shift towards permanent employment and fixed salaries after Kiki's Delivery Service, with reforms beginning during Only Yesterday's production. It also describes Miyazaki's involvement in planning the Koganei studio, down to drawings and material choices.[5] Those details move me. The care visible on screen depends on decisions about actual working lives and actual rooms. Even a place associated with dreams needs somebody to work out how it will remain open.
The many hands inside The Boy and the Heron
The Boy and the Heron brings all of this unusually close. Released in Japan in July 2023, it emerged after roughly seven years of production.[6] I find something deeply affecting in the simple fact of those years. A large part of a person's life can pass while a film acquires its final shape. People age during its making. Their understanding changes. The completed work carries time that cannot be recovered by watching it more quickly. Knowing this changes the way I look at its movement. I become more conscious of the people who kept returning to the images until they could give them to us.
Takeshi Honda, the animation director, deserves particular recognition. His account of the production describes a living process of decisions and revisions. Natsuko's design grew from his own drawing; changes to Mahito's hair followed the movement required in a scene. These are wonderfully concrete matters. A character's appearance develops through the demands of being alive on screen. Honda also describes Miyazaki checking layouts and animation while continuing the storyboards and colour discussions. I admire the concentration involved, and the fact that the film could absorb another accomplished artist's sensibility within its own.[7] The team extends far beyond that central exchange. Toshiyuki Inoue brought his experience to demanding character and bird animation. Akihiko Yamashita's work includes the scene in which Mahito eats bread and jam, a small event made almost startlingly vivid. Honda speaks warmly of the skill of colleagues including Katsuya Kondō, Atsuko Tanaka and Takeshi Inamura.[7, 8] Remembering these names matters to me. The movement that seems effortless in a cinema has passed through particular minds and hands. A studio's identity lives partly in those differences of observation, gathered closely enough to make a shared world.
Atsushi Okui's cinematography and digital imaging help bring the drawn material together. His description of deepening the blacks after the artwork became data makes the method clear: hand-drawn animation can exist within a contemporary digital process.[9] I value the accuracy of that account. Ghibli's continuity comes through artistic decisions about how tools should serve the image. It has never required every production stage to remain fixed in 1995. Joe Hisaishi's music adds another familiar presence, carrying the emotional understanding of a collaboration that has lasted across decades.[10] Drawing, compositing and music meet in something I experience as an entire atmosphere.
I am especially attached to what drawing asks someone to notice. To make a body move convincingly, an artist has to spend time with the particular action: where the weight goes, how reluctance appears, what changes when a person is hungry or afraid. Even a fantastic creature needs decisions about the manner of its existence. The affection I feel for traditional animation includes that patient consideration. I can enjoy the finished image and also feel grateful for the time somebody spent considering how a living thing might behave. That is a form of company, available long after the drawing is finished. The film itself is restless, sometimes frightening, and full of grief. Its beauty has sharp edges. That seems appropriate to the role it occupies in my life. When I say Ghibli represents calm, I am thinking of the sustained attention that makes such a work possible, and of the trust a film can place in its audience. It can leave me uncertain. It can ask something of me. I come away feeling that another person has taken the experience of being alive seriously enough to labour over it for years.
Preserving a studio that is still alive
Ghibli's present organisation is part of this story. It became a Nippon Television subsidiary in October 2023. The acquisition announcement explicitly connected management support with protecting an environment in which the studio could continue making films.[11] As of its June 2026 company profile, Kenichi Yoda is president, Suzuki chairs the board, Miyazaki is honorary chairman, and Gorō Miyazaki is a managing director.[12] Such titles can look remote from a child's encounter with a film, yet the question behind them is familiar: how does something precious survive the passage of the people who began it?
I want Ghibli to remain capable of answering that question through work. The museum gives me a useful expression of this ambition. In his statement about the kind of museum he wanted to make, Miyazaki describes a place that continues to develop new exhibits and original films, with its surrounding park becoming better over time.[13] I hear a living responsibility in that. Preservation requires renewal, and renewal requires judgment about what deserves to continue. The studio's recent park film, A Night in the Valley of Witches, directed by Gorō Miyazaki and Yamashita, is one concrete example of animation continuing beyond the feature-film release cycle.[14]
I look forward to the next Ghibli feature with an affection that has survived plenty of waiting. I want to encounter whatever story earns the commitment of its makers. My hope for their future allows time for that decision. There is already an extraordinary body of work to return to, and a great deal of human ability behind the studio's name. I believe it can remain a bastion for the kind of animation I love. That belief is a responsibility I place on my own attention too, on being willing to notice the work when it arrives and give it the time it asks for.
Growing older without leaving beauty behind
As each year passes, Miyazaki becomes a more useful model for me. I am drawn to the continuing engagement of his working life: the capacity to be dissatisfied with a drawing, to become interested in another possibility, to keep testing what an image might contain. I have my own stories to make, and limited years in which to make them. His example brings that fact into focus without making it feel empty. There is still work to do, and doing it can remain an absorbing way of inhabiting the years.
I want some of the quiet I associate with Japan to enter that work and the life around it. I can make room for an unhurried walk. I can spend longer looking at a tree before turning it into an image. In a story, I can let someone finish an ordinary action before moving them towards the next dramatic event. These are small choices, but they affect the world I am making. The longing begins to have a use when it changes what I give other people, rather than remaining entirely inside what I miss. There are days when that feels difficult. The pace outside does enter the room, and I can find myself treating my own work with the same impatience I dislike elsewhere. Looking at Miyazaki helps me recognise the habit. An image needs enough time to become particular. A story needs room to surprise the person writing it. I want to grow older with that willingness intact, still capable of discovering something in a drawing that I could not have planned before I began.
I return, finally, to the imagined walk towards the studio. The temple is still there among the houses. The trees have grown through years I cannot revisit. Somewhere nearby, somebody is beginning a day's work. I know the melancholy in this picture, and I accept it. I also feel gratitude for a place and a body of art that have kept something recognisable within reach. The perpetual nineties is my name for that continuity. Through Miyazaki and Ghibli, it remains possible to meet it in the present, then carry a little of its quiet home.
Sources and further reading
[1] The Wachowskis, The Matrix, revised screenplay dated 9 March 1998. Agent Smith's description of the simulation appears in his interrogation of Morpheus. dailyscript.com
[2] Bank of Japan, Masaaki Shirakawa, Way Out of Economic and Financial Crisis, 23 April 2009; Cabinet Office, overview of the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake; Public Security Intelligence Agency, Tokyo subway sarin attack archive. www2.boj.or.jp · bousai.go.jp · moj.go.jp
[3] Roger Ebert, Drawing on Spirited World, interview with Hayao Miyazaki. rogerebert.com
[4] Studio Ghibli, official history; GKIDS, Studio Ghibli creator biographies. ghibli.jp · gkids.com
[5] Studio Ghibli, official history, sections on permanent employment and construction of the Koganei studio. ghibli.jp
[6] Nippon Television and Studio Ghibli, share acquisition announcement, 21 September 2023, which records seven years of production; Studio Ghibli, official film credits. ntv.co.jp · ghibli.jp
[7] Matteo Watzky, Takeshi Honda's The Boy and the Heron, interview, Full Frontal, 29 December 2023. fullfrontal.moe
[8] Full Frontal, Toshiyuki Inoue's The Boy and the Heron, production interview. fullfrontal.moe
[9] Gemma Gracewood, Bird's Eye View, interview with Atsushi Okui, Letterboxd Journal. letterboxd.com
[10] Studio Ghibli, The Boy and the Heron official credits. ghibli.jp
[11] Nippon Television and Studio Ghibli, share acquisition announcement, 21 September 2023. ntv.co.jp
[12] Studio Ghibli, company profile updated June 2026; notice of presidential succession, 14 May 2026. ghibli.jp · ghibli.jp
[13] Hayao Miyazaki, This Kind of Museum, Ghibli Museum official statement. ghibli-museum.jp
[14] Studio Ghibli, official chronology, July 2026 entry. ghibli.jp
A note on the series
This is Pillars 005, Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, the latest essay in my Pillars series, following Mike Pondsmith at 004. The sequence began with Matt Nava, followed by Frank Frazetta and Hideo Kojima. Each entry corresponds to one of my own stories, with those connections being established as the series develops. Matt Nava's is Daudas. These pairings trace how the artists I admire have helped shape the stories I am learning to tell in The Quantumyth.