If you only know Ghibli through Miyazaki, you know a studio that does not exist. Two other people founded it, and between them they determined what it made and whether it survived long enough to make it.
Isao Takahata, 1935–2018
Takahata studied French literature at the University of Tokyo and joined Toei Animation in 1959. He could not draw — not in the professional sense, not to animation standard — and never learned. He directed by analysis: research, structure, tone, and an unusual willingness to hand visual authorship to the people who could draw, then push them somewhere they had not intended to go.
His first feature, The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968), went wildly over schedule and budget, was buried by Toei on release, and is now regarded as a turning point in Japanese animation. Miyazaki worked on it. The pattern — Takahata takes far too long, produces something formally radical, and costs everyone a great deal of money — recurred for fifty years.
The five Ghibli features
- Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Two children in the last months of the war. The film opens with the boy's death and then goes back. It is not an anti-war film in the persuasive sense; it is a film about what happens after the persuading is over. Roger Ebert put it among the great war films, and he was right.
- Only Yesterday (1991). A 27-year-old office worker takes leave to work on a safflower farm and is accompanied by memories of being ten. Radical for its subject alone: an animated feature about an adult woman's ordinary life, with no fantasy element at all.
- Pom Poko (1994). Shape-shifting raccoon dogs fight suburban development outside Tokyo. Funny, then bleak, then unbearably sad. It contains one of the strangest sequences in any animated feature, and I will not spoil it.
- My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999). A newspaper four-panel strip adapted as loose watercolour vignettes with no plot. Commercially a failure. Formally, the studio's boldest film until his last.
- The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013). Eight years in production, drawn as charcoal and watercolour sketch that never resolves into finished cel line — the drawing stays visibly unfinished, and in the film's central sequence it disintegrates entirely into scratched charcoal. It is the most beautiful thing the studio has produced and it lost a great deal of money.
He spent fifty years proving that animation did not have to be about anything impossible.
Takahata died in April 2018, aged 82. Miyazaki's eulogy, delivered in tears, described a friendship and a rivalry that had run since 1963 and had, by both men's accounts, been genuinely difficult for long stretches.
Toshio Suzuki
Suzuki was a magazine editor. He worked at Tokuma Shoten on Animage, where he commissioned the Nausicaä manga in the first place — largely to give Miyazaki a property that could be filmed, since the studio would not fund an original feature by an unproven director. He has been the studio's producer since its founding and is currently its president.
What a producer does at Ghibli is not what a producer does in Hollywood. Suzuki decides which project proceeds, arranges financing, manages distribution and marketing, and — the part that matters most — manages two directors with entirely incompatible working methods, one of whom does not finish scripts and the other of whom does not finish on time. He is also responsible for a great many of the English release titles and for the marketing decisions that made these films commercial in Japan, including the choice to release The Boy and the Heron with essentially no advertising at all.
The 2023 sale of a majority stake to Nippon Television was his call, and he has been direct about the reasoning: there was no successor, the founders were in their eighties, and the library needed an owner who could look after it. It is not a romantic decision. Neither was salarying the animators in 1989, and that one is now cited as a founding virtue.
Yoshifumi Kondō, the successor who died
Kondō was the animation director on Kiki's Delivery Service, Only Yesterday and Princess Mononoke, and directed Whisper of the Heart in 1995 — a film about a fourteen-year-old deciding to become a writer that is, on rewatch, about whether you are allowed to try at something before you are good at it. He was understood inside and outside the studio as the next generation.
He died in January 1998, aged 47, of an aortic dissection. The studio's punishing schedules were widely discussed afterwards as a contributing factor, including by Miyazaki. Every succession conversation Ghibli has had since — the 2014 suspension, the Nippon TV sale — traces back to that January.
If you want to understand why Ghibli is not simply "Miyazaki's studio," watch Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro back to back, in the order they were released together in 1988. Same company, same year, same double bill. One is a childhood idyll; the other is a child dying of malnutrition in a cave. That double bill is the studio's real self-portrait.
Biographical detail follows the public record and the studio's statements; readings of the films are mine. Corrections: contact.