There is a widely held belief that Ghibli films share a sensibility: gentle, pastoral, environmental, a young girl at the centre. Watch them in order and that belief does not survive. Between Grave of the Fireflies and Porco Rosso there is no common register at all, and the two men responsible spent thirty years making films that read, at times, as direct rebuttals of each other.
The features, in order
Theatrical features produced by Studio Ghibli, plus Nausicaä, which predates the studio but is distributed as part of its catalogue.
| Film | Year | Director |
|---|---|---|
| Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind | 1984 | Hayao Miyazaki — pre-dates the studio |
| Castle in the Sky | 1986 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| Grave of the Fireflies | 1988 | Isao Takahata |
| My Neighbor Totoro | 1988 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| Kiki's Delivery Service | 1989 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| Only Yesterday | 1991 | Isao Takahata |
| Porco Rosso | 1992 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| Ocean Waves | 1993 | Tomomi Mochizuki — made for television |
| Pom Poko | 1994 | Isao Takahata |
| Whisper of the Heart | 1995 | Yoshifumi Kondō |
| Princess Mononoke | 1997 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| My Neighbors the Yamadas | 1999 | Isao Takahata |
| Spirited Away | 2001 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| The Cat Returns | 2002 | Hiroyuki Morita |
| Howl's Moving Castle | 2004 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| Tales from Earthsea | 2006 | Gorō Miyazaki |
| Ponyo | 2008 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| The Secret World of Arrietty | 2010 | Hiromasa Yonebayashi |
| From Up on Poppy Hill | 2011 | Gorō Miyazaki |
| The Wind Rises | 2013 | Hayao Miyazaki |
| The Tale of the Princess Kaguya | 2013 | Isao Takahata |
| When Marnie Was There | 2014 | Hiromasa Yonebayashi |
| The Red Turtle | 2016 | Michaël Dudok de Wit — international co-production |
| Earwig and the Witch | 2020 | Gorō Miyazaki — the studio's first fully CG feature |
| The Boy and the Heron | 2023 | Hayao Miyazaki |
Where a newcomer should start
Not with Spirited Away, which is the standard advice and, I think, wrong. It is a masterpiece and it is also completely untethered from any explanatory frame — you are dropped into a bathhouse for spirits with no exposition, which is thrilling if you already trust the film and bewildering if you do not.
Start with Kiki's Delivery Service. A thirteen-year-old moves to a new town for a year, starts a small business, gets tired, loses confidence, and slowly gets it back. There is no villain and no crisis beyond an ordinary one. It teaches you the studio's actual grammar — that a scene can exist to show someone making bread — and once you have that, Spirited Away lands properly.
You are not waiting for the plot to start. That is the film.
The two-director problem
Miyazaki's films move: flight, water, wind, machinery, bodies running. Takahata's films sit still and watch. Only Yesterday is a woman on a train remembering fifth grade. My Neighbors the Yamadas is a newspaper comic strip rendered as watercolour vignettes with no continuous plot whatsoever. Grave of the Fireflies is a film about two children starving to death in 1945 and it opens by telling you they die.
Both directors made films the other could not have made. It is worth watching at least one Takahata before deciding what Ghibli is, because the popular image of the studio is really an image of Miyazaki with Takahata cropped out.
The films outside the two founders
Whisper of the Heart (1995) was directed by Yoshifumi Kondō, widely considered the studio's designated successor; he died in 1998 at 47, and the succession problem the studio spent the next twenty-five years wrestling with dates from that loss. Arrietty and When Marnie Was There are Hiromasa Yonebayashi's, and both are quietly excellent. Gorō Miyazaki's four projects have had a harder critical reception, of which the fairest thing to say is that directing at Studio Ghibli under the surname Miyazaki is not a job anyone should envy.
On dubs, since this is an American site: the Disney-era English dubs are generally good, occasionally excellent, and they take small liberties — added lines over silences, mostly, on the theory that Anglophone audiences panic when nobody is talking. If a film feels chattier than the pacing implies, try the subtitled version and notice how much quieter it is.
Short films
Beyond the features, Ghibli has produced a body of short films that are largely unavailable outside Japan by design. The Saturn Theater at the Ghibli Museum screens shorts made specifically for it — no home release, no streaming. Since July 2026, Ghibli Park's Cinema Orion has screened Majo no Tani no Yoru (A Night in the Witch's Valley), an original short co-directed by Gorō Miyazaki and Akihiko Yamashita and set in the park's own Valley of Witches. The studio has made no announcement about releasing it more widely.
Directors and years reflect the studio's own catalogue listings. Where a film is a co-production or a television production, that is noted. Corrections: contact.