A Ghibli feature contains somewhere in the region of sixty to eighty thousand individual drawings. Princess Mononoke is often cited at around 144,000. The interesting question is not how anyone draws that many pictures. It is how they all end up looking like the work of one hand.
The pipeline, in order
- Storyboard (e-konte). Every shot, drawn small, with timing, dialogue and camera notes. At Ghibli this is the film's real script. Miyazaki draws his own, in production, sometimes ahead of the animators by only a few weeks.
- Layout. Each shot worked up full-size: where the camera is, where the characters sit in the frame, what the background must contain. Miyazaki personally checks these, and it is the single biggest bottleneck in the studio's schedule.
- Key animation (genga). Senior animators draw the extremes of each movement — the poses that define it. This is the authored part.
- In-betweens (douga). The drawings that get you from one key to the next, plus clean-up to a consistent line. Traditionally the entry-level job and where Ghibli trained its own staff rather than farming out.
- Colour. Historically ink and paint on acetate cels; from the late 1990s, digital paint applied to scanned line art.
- Backgrounds. Painted separately, by hand, usually poster colour on board.
- Composite and photography. Layers assembled, camera moves applied, shot to film — later, rendered digitally.
Full animation, and the "one, two, three" question
Film runs at 24 frames per second. Drawing a new image for every frame is "on ones." Holding each drawing for two frames — twelve drawings a second — is "on twos," and it is the standard for most theatrical animation worldwide. Much Japanese television animation runs on threes, eight drawings a second, which is cheaper and reads as choppier.
Ghibli works largely on twos and drops to ones for movement that needs to feel continuous — water, flight, a running figure. That is unremarkable. What is remarkable is the studio's willingness to spend drawings on things that are not action: a character shifting weight while listening, hair settling after a head turns, steam moving off a bowl. Most productions cut exactly these to save money. Ghibli treats them as the reason for the shot.
The budget goes into the parts of the frame where nothing is happening.
The multiplane camera
A flat painted background photographed behind a flat character cel gives you a flat image. The multiplane camera solves this by separating the artwork into physically distinct panes of glass at different distances below the camera, and moving them at different rates during a shot. Near foreground travels fast, distant hills barely move, and the eye reads depth — the same parallax you get looking sideways from a moving train.
The technique long predates Ghibli — Disney built an elaborate multiplane crane in the 1930s, and Lotte Reiniger was doing a version of it in the 1920s — but the studio's use of it is unusually disciplined. The layered composites survive into the digital era: the software changed, the thinking did not. The hero image at the top of every page on this site is a small joke about that, five painted plates travelling at five different rates.
In March 2026 Miyazaki unveiled something called the Panorama Box, a physical layered display arranging backgrounds and figures from the films to create depth. Eighty-four years old and still solving the same problem.
Backgrounds: poster colour on board
Ghibli's backgrounds are painted with gouache — opaque water-based poster colour — on board, by a background department working under an art director. Kazuo Oga is the name most associated with the look: the forests of Totoro and Mononoke are largely his department's, and the density of green in those films comes from painting technique rather than from anything the animation is doing.
The visible brushwork is the point. A photographic or airbrushed background would sit oddly under a hand-drawn character; a painted one shares the character's tolerance for imprecision. When Takahata pushed this to its limit in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, dropping finished line and colour altogether in favour of charcoal and thin watercolour that leaves the paper visible, the effect is not a different technique so much as the existing technique with the polish removed.
Machines that were never built
Miyazaki's aircraft and contraptions are designed with a level of mechanical plausibility that no plot requires. The flaptor gunships in Nausicaä, Porco's seaplane, the Gutiokipanja bakery ovens, Howl's castle walking on chicken legs: each has visible linkages, control surfaces, exhaust, wear. Things vibrate. Pilots fight the controls.
This is a deliberate anchor. The films ask you to accept a great deal — a spirit bathhouse, a bus that is a cat — and they buy that credit by being obsessively literal about how a machine transmits force. Once you notice it, you cannot stop noticing it.
What went digital, and what did not
The romantic account has Ghibli as a purely analogue holdout. That is not accurate. Princess Mononoke (1997) used digital compositing and some CG for specific effects, and by Spirited Away the studio had moved to digital ink and paint — the cels are gone. What remains hand-drawn is the drawing: keys and in-betweens on paper, pencil, corrected by hand. Backgrounds are still painted physically and scanned.
Earwig and the Witch (2020) was the exception, a fully CG feature directed by Gorō Miyazaki. Its reception was cool, and the studio has not repeated the experiment. The Boy and the Heron went back to paper.
The most useful single thing at the Ghibli Museum, for me, was not a film or an exhibit but the recreated animator's room: paper stacked to the ceiling, dozens of reference books left open, pencil shavings. It reframes the whole enterprise as a workshop with deadlines rather than an act of inspiration, which I suspect is exactly what it was designed to do.
Technical descriptions here are general to hand-drawn feature animation and to the studio's publicly documented practice. Corrections: contact.