The score arrives before the film does

Most film scores are written last, to a locked picture, by a composer watching a screen. Ghibli inverted this almost from the start, and the inversion is audible.

The image album

Before the animation exists in any finished form, the composer is given the storyboards and asked to write an image album: a set of pieces responding to the film's mood and ideas rather than to specific scenes, with no timings to hit. The album is released commercially, and it also feeds back into production — the director hears the music while the film is still being drawn.

So the score is not applied to the picture. It runs alongside it, sometimes ahead of it, and occasionally the picture is cut toward the music. Joe Hisaishi has said the Nausicaä image album came before most of the film existed. Once you know this, the unusual fit between image and score in these films stops being mysterious.

The music is not a layer added at the end. It is one of the materials the film is built out of.

Joe Hisaishi

Born Mamoru Fujisawa in 1950; the professional name is a Japanese transliteration play on Quincy Jones. He came out of minimalism — Reich, Glass, repetitive cellular writing — and that background is still there under the melodies, in the ostinatos and the patient rhythmic layering.

He scored Nausicaä in 1984, before Ghibli existed, and has scored every Miyazaki feature since, through The Boy and the Heron in 2023. That is one composer and one director across four decades, which is close to unmatched in cinema.

His writing for these films moves between three registers: a solo piano line, plain enough to be played badly by a child, which is usually the emotional centre; a large late-Romantic orchestra, deployed rarely and with force; and folk or modal material with the specific instrumentation of the film's world. The best-known cue, the "Merry-Go-Round of Life" waltz from Howl's Moving Castle, is all three at once — a piano tune, orchestrated enormously, in the shape of a nineteenth-century dance.

Silence, and why the films feel spacious

Miyazaki has described a concept he calls ma — roughly, the interval or empty space between things — and Ghibli films use it structurally. There are long stretches with no music and no dialogue: a character sitting, wind moving, rain on a roof. Studios elsewhere fill these; the received wisdom is that audiences disengage.

The result is that when the orchestra does arrive, it lands. The train sequence in Spirited Away, moving across flooded track with almost nothing said, works because the preceding twenty minutes did not insist on your attention. This is also, incidentally, the thing English dubs most often erode — a line added over a silence to reassure an Anglophone audience that the film has not stopped.

The other composers

Hisaishi is not the whole story. Takahata worked with different composers across his features and treated music very differently — Only Yesterday uses Hungarian and Romanian folk material, arranged by Katz Hoshi, for a film set in rural Yamagata, which sounds like a mistake and is not. My Neighbors the Yamadas is scored by Akiko Yano, whose approach fits the film's cartoon looseness. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya brought Hisaishi to a Takahata film for the first and only time, and it is arguably the finest score either man produced.

Songs

The vocal themes have had a life of their own in Japan. Azumi Inoue sang for Totoro and Kiki. Yumi Matsutoya's songs carry Kiki's Delivery Service. Yoshie Hisaishi's "The Name of Life" from Spirited Away plays over the closing credits. Ponyo's title song became genuinely inescapable in Japan in 2008. Kenshi Yonezu wrote and performed "Spinning Globe" for The Boy and the Heron, a piece of casting that connected the studio to a contemporary Japanese pop audience in a way it had not attempted in years.

Credits follow the films' own listings. Readings of the scores are mine. Corrections: contact.