CULTURE
The Realism of Studio Ghibli Movies
Can Ghibli movies be made with Artificial Intelligence?
When asked to describe Ghibli movies, every enthusiast uses almost the same words: awe, nostalgia, sadness, and memories of a simpler time.
And those feelings are not experienced only by those who hold these movies dear to them, they captured the hearts of people all over the world for a reason. They manage to evoke these universal emotions that are at the very core of being human by carefully building an imaginative world that, at its foundation, relates to almost every human experience.
So, let’s explore Studio Ghibli from a world-building standpoint and attempt to figure out how they’re able to elicit these feelings through the environments they’re creating, and more importantly, can these movies be crafted using Artificial Intelligence (AI) instead of being freehand?
Miyazaki made his view clear regarding AI when he said, “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
For him, careful observation and experience of the world is the key to bringing his animations to life, he makes a direct correlation between the personal experience and the skills of an animator.
The core of what distinguishes his movies is the feeling, the tactility, the memories, and their ability to tickle our emotions. They make us feel a little bit more alive. All of these ethereal details cannot be generated by AI simply because they need to be experienced first.
We do know for certain that AI is improving constantly, and it is making many processes more efficient. But we also know that almost every single Ghibli movie since their first international release — ’ Nausicaä’ — has been a big hit at the box office.
We will always crave the human experience, and we saw this through the pandemic, we continued to crave meeting up with people, getting outside, and traveling; we’re social creatures, and maybe that’s the one thing about human nature we can’t change.
The environment of these movies plays a huge role alongside the character-building to make these movies come alive.
There are two minutes close to the end of the movie Spirited Away where nothing happens. Chihiro, the protagonist, sits quietly on a train as we accompany her to her destination. Yet it's one of the most powerful moments in the movie.
Similar scenes were played a lot in almost every Ghibli movie, where it seems like nothing is really happening, but Hayao Miyazaki included these few empty moments for a reason — they're to process what’s going on and to build empathy and a connection to the characters and the story on a deeper level. It gives us a break to breathe and potentially reflect on what this character just went through.
There is a Japanese concept, Ma, described as a pause in time, an interval, or emptiness in space. Ma is the time and space life needs to breathe, feel, and connect. If we have no time, if our space is restricted, we cannot grow.
Ma is not simply the absence of things, it's an active presence that shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world around us. This concept is crafted as negative spaces in every Ghibli movie, designed with an incredible amount of sensory detail.
Many sceneries include aspects that you can almost feel: the dampness of the rain, the sound of the wind, hearing the grass rustle or blow, and trees when the wind blows through them.
When we touch something, the Amygdala, the part of our brain responsible for triggering an emotional reaction as well as memory formation and storage, creates an emotional memory.
In Ghibli movies, the sensory nuances in these empty moments are emphasized so that when we watch these scenes, we’re not simply looking at the objects on the screen, but we’re experiencing them. We are feeling the tactile sensations and becoming mired in emotions and memories.
“Anime may depict fictional worlds, but I nonetheless believe that at its core it must have a certain realism. Even if the world depicted is a lie, the trick is to make it seem as real as possible.” — Hayao Miyazaki
With all of the extra detail and extended pauses, if you look at the movie from an efficiency standpoint, you’re really wasting significant time that could be spent learning about the characters through action and dialogue. Thus, Miyazaki utilizes environments to offer a fuller picture of the narrative and the characters.
A great example is shown in the difference between Yubaba and her sister Zeniba. The sisters are twins, so we can’t identify who is who just by looking at them. We only get limited screen time with each. But we can certainly get a much fuller understanding of each sister by looking at their apartments.
Yubaba is the bathhouse’s head. She’s the wicked sister. She lives on the top floor. It’s made clear to us that getting to the top takes a lot of elevator trips. The entry to her floor is a grand experience, full of ornaments and royalty-like details.
The procession of rooms was a common arrangement in Baroque palaces in the 17th century. The first room is the public room and the royal bedroom is at the very end. Everything in between was estate rooms used for entertainment. You’re allowed to go as far as your rank would allow you.
So even before we meet Yubaba, we get the impression that she’s literally on top of everything, and then once we’re in her room it’s a completely different style from the rest of the building, or the sleeping quarters of the workers which is more understated in the traditional Japanese style.
We can see from this that she is not only greedy for wealth and power, but she’s kind of forced-fitted into the rest of the environment almost in a gimmicky way.
Zeniba’s house, in contrast, is an isolated tiny cottage on a farm hidden behind a forest. The house is simple and understated, appearing to be modeled after a traditional Irish cottage from the 1850s.
Zeniba’s simple and down-to-earth personality is reflected in the interior of her house: warm, rustic and very minimal.
What’s interesting is that neither of these architectural styles is used to create a literal connection to the Baroque period or a traditional Irish cottage.
We subconsciously and purely create emotional connections to certain places or buildings which is why the architecture or the environment often serves as a reference. It’s always a combination of different styles to create a certain mood or feeling.
So the answer to our main question would probably be no, these movies are about human experiences. Despite their magical world-building AI cannot compete with that.
