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.
Isao Takahata's 1991 film follows Taeko, twenty-seven, on a countryside holiday where memories of herself at age ten resurface alongside a present-day romance with a young farmer. Adapted from an episodic manga that covered only the childhood material, with the adult framing story invented by Takahata himself, it became the highest-grossing Japanese film of 1991 despite total absence of fantasy or spectacle.
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.
A shipwrecked man's repeated attempts to leave an uninhabited island are sabotaged by a giant red sea turtle, and his violent response to it sets in motion a transformation that reshapes his life on the island rather than ending it. Michaël Dudok de Wit's feature debut, made at Hayao Miyazaki's suggestion after he saw the director's short Father and Daughter, tells its entire story without a single word of dialogue across three generations on one stretch of sand.
A fictionalised account of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who dreamed of flight but could only design the machines rather than pilot them himself. Hayao Miyazaki's 2013 film pairs a delicate romance with the uncomfortable fact of what Horikoshi's designs became.