A tiny Borrower named Arrietty risks everything her family fears by letting herself be seen by a sickly human boy. Hiromasa Yonebayashi's 2010 directorial debut, based on Mary Norton's novel, trades Ghibli's usual scale for something quieter and more contained.
Howl's Moving Castle adapts Diana Wynne Jones's novel about a young milliner cursed into old age by a witch, who ends up living in a wizard's walking castle as a war between two kingdoms escalates around them. Hayao Miyazaki directed the film for Studio Ghibli after an earlier director departed, and it took $236 million against a $24 million budget, becoming one of the most commercially successful Japanese films ever made and winning a Nebula Award for Best Script.
Pom Poko follows a colony of shapeshifting tanuki in the hills outside Tokyo as they organize, and ultimately fail, to stop a suburban development project from destroying their forest home across three decades. Isao Takahata wrote and directed for Studio Ghibli, drawing on Japanese bake-danuki folklore and crediting several folklorists and illustrators for the tanuki's designs and lore. The film topped Japan's box office in 1994, taking in ¥4.47 billion, and won the Grand Prix at Annecy the following year.
Princess Mononoke follows Ashitaka, a young prince cursed by a demonized boar god, as he travels west and becomes caught in the war between Lady Eboshi's ironworks town and the animal gods defending their forest, including San, a girl raised by wolves. Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed the film for Studio Ghibli after nearly two decades of development, using limited computer-generated imagery alongside hand-drawn animation for the first time in his work. Marketed by producer Toshio Suzuki in the largest advertising campaign Japan had seen for a film at that point, it became the country's highest-grossing release and the first Ghibli film given a wide international release, through a Disney-brokered deal that handed its English dub to novelist Neil Gaiman.
Spirited Away follows ten-year-old Chihiro, whose parents are turned into pigs after wandering into a spirit world, as she takes a job in the witch Yubaba's bathhouse to survive and undo the curse. Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed the film for Studio Ghibli after designing it specifically for the young daughters of family friends, and it became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history at the time, winning the Golden Bear and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
After his mother dies in wartime Japan, Mahito Maki moves to the countryside, follows a talking grey heron into an abandoned tower, and enters a fantastical realm governed by its own private logic. Hayao Miyazaki spent roughly seven years making the film, released in Japan with no trailers, stills or synopsis beyond a single poster.