A company built to make one film at a time

Most animation studios are built to keep working. Ghibli was built to keep working on one film at a time, which is a different and much harder proposition, and it has spent four decades absorbing the consequences of that decision.

Before there was a studio

The founders met at Toei Animation in the 1960s, and later worked together on television series and on the 1979 feature The Castle of Cagliostro. The immediate precursor to Ghibli was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, released in Japanese theatres in March 1984. Miyazaki had been serialising the manga since 1982, largely because the publisher, Tokuma Shoten, wanted a property it could film. Isao Takahata produced. The film was animated not by Ghibli — which did not yet exist — but by Topcraft, a studio that shortly afterwards went out of business.

Nausicaä did well enough that Tokuma agreed to fund a permanent operation. Studio Ghibli was established in June 1985, with the Topcraft core as its staff. This is why so many people describe Nausicaä as a Ghibli film even though it predates the company: the crew is the same, the producer is the same, and the studio itself has long since folded it into its own catalogue.

The name comes from an Italian aircraft, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli, itself named for a hot Saharan wind. Miyazaki is a lifelong aviation obsessive, and the intended sense was a new wind blowing through Japanese animation. The Italian pronunciation would be closer to "gee-blee"; the studio's own Japanese rendering, Jiburi, has more or less settled the argument in favour of the hard G everywhere else.

A studio with no television series, no merchandising engine of its own, and no second production line is a studio that lives or dies on each film.

The decade that nearly ended it

The first Ghibli film, Castle in the Sky (1986), underperformed relative to expectations. The 1988 double bill of My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies — two films that could hardly be less alike, released together — did modest theatrical business and became durable only afterwards, on television and on video, and in Totoro's case through merchandise the studio had not originally planned for.

The turn came with Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989, the year's top-grossing domestic release in Japan. From that point Ghibli films were more or less reliably at or near the top of the Japanese box office, which is an extraordinary run for hand-drawn features aimed at no particular demographic.

Two structural decisions from this period matter more than any single film. First, in 1989 the studio began putting animators on full-time salaries rather than the piece rates that were, and largely remain, standard in the Japanese industry. Second, it committed to training its own staff in-house. Both raised fixed costs enormously and both were deliberate: the argument was that you cannot get consistent drawing across eighty thousand images from a rotating cast of freelancers.

Spirited Away and the ceiling

Princess Mononoke (1997) was the most expensive Japanese animated film made to that point and became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, briefly. Then Spirited Away (2001) took the record back and held it for around two decades. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and the Golden Bear at Berlin — the only hand-drawn, non-English-language film to have done either.

Commercially, this was the ceiling, and it created a problem the studio has never entirely solved: every subsequent film has been measured against a genuine cultural anomaly. Internally, the more pressing issue was succession. Miyazaki was in his sixties. Takahata worked at a pace that produced five features in thirty years. There was no third director with an equivalent track record.

2014: the studio stops

After When Marnie Was There (2014), Ghibli halted feature production and dissolved its animation department. English-language coverage reported this as a closure; it was more precisely a suspension. Keeping a salaried crew of that size employed with no film in production is not sustainable, and the studio chose to stop rather than manufacture work.

The company continued to exist, handling its library, licensing, and the museum. Staff dispersed — a number went to Studio Ponoc, founded by former Ghibli producer Yoshiaki Nishimura, which made Mary and the Witch's Flower in 2017 with a largely ex-Ghibli crew. When Miyazaki began work on what became The Boy and the Heron, the department had to be substantially rebuilt.

The Boy and the Heron, and Nippon TV

The Boy and the Heron opened in Japan on 14 July 2023 with a marketing campaign that consisted, essentially, of one poster. No trailer, no plot summary, no cast list. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2024 — Ghibli's second — and did strong international business, including an unusually large American opening for a subtitled animated film.

In September 2023 Nippon Television Holdings acquired a majority stake, making Ghibli a subsidiary. Toshio Suzuki has been clear that the reason was succession: no obvious internal successor, two founders in their eighties, and a library that needed a custodian with a balance sheet. Nippon TV had been a Ghibli investor since the 1980s, so the buyer was not a stranger. Whether ownership by a broadcaster changes what the studio makes is the open question of the next decade.

Where things stand in 2026

Miyazaki, 84 as of January 2026, is developing something; the studio confirmed as much in March 2026 without naming it. Goro Miyazaki continues to direct — most recently the short Majo no Tani no Yoru, screening at Ghibli Park since July 2026. The museum in Mitaka runs annual special exhibitions. The park is proceeding toward a third phase.

That is a company doing several things at once, which is new. For most of its life Ghibli did exactly one thing at a time, extremely slowly, and dared the market to wait.

Founded

15 June 1985, Tokyo

Founders

Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Toshio Suzuki, with Yasuyoshi Tokuma of Tokuma Shoten

Headquarters

Koganei, western Tokyo

Ownership

Subsidiary of Nippon Television Holdings since 2023

Academy Awards

Best Animated Feature for Spirited Away (2003) and The Boy and the Heron (2024)

Sources for this page are the studio's and operators' own published statements plus contemporaneous press reporting. Corrections are welcome — see contact.