Hayao Miyazaki and his colleagues at Studio Ghibli craft pictures that are so delicately drawn and convincingly textured that it seems as if we should be able to step right into them. Think of the bustling bathhouse of “Spirited Away” or the bucolic Japanese countryside of “My Neighbor Totoro.”
But as viewers, we are never able to actually enter these worlds of tender emotions, whimsical characters and, perhaps above all, vivid locations that set the imagination ablaze. Movies are made from flat 2-D images; they remain tantalizingly out of reach.
The most committed Ghibli fans can travel to Ghibli Park in Nagoya, Japan, and Ghibli Museum in Tokyo for a tactile experience of their beloved animated films. But most of us are not making that globe-trotting journey.
Enter video games, which allow players to explore immersive 3-D environments and satisfy many fantasies: the sword-wielding savior, the slayer of fantastical beasts, the fleet-footed time traveler.
The influence of Studio Ghibli — which turned 40 this week — can be seen throughout the industry, notably in recent additions to the Legend of Zelda franchise. Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of the Kingdom (2023) each offer pastoral experiences tinged with menace, similar to many Ghibli pictures; their cel-shaded graphics also evoke the studio’s exquisite painterly style. In Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda’s devoted knight Link moves between floating land masses that evoke those in “Castle in the Sky.”
(Nintendo, which did not respond to a request for comment, does not appear to have openly acknowledged the influence.)
Ni No Kuni, the fairy-tale role-playing game franchise, is the product of a longstanding collaboration with Ghibli. But beyond these Japanese mainstays, several Western game makers have put distinct spins on the dream of occupying a living, breathing Ghibli-esque world.
Their games are crafted with a comparable kind of handmade intentionality, where action and quietude are given equal billing, where nature and technology collide in dazzling new configurations, and where the dinky details of domesticity command as much importance as a gigantic horizon oriented toward adventure.
These designers and artists are mostly millennials, exposed in the 2000s to Ghibli’s elegant and often melancholic style after the breakthrough success of “Spirited Away.” Gaze upon the perfect Ghibli-blue skies, powdery clouds and charming Totoro-like woodland creature companion of the puzzle-platformer Planet of Lana (2023). Or the unsparing stare and ferocious might of the white wolf in the action-adventure Neva (2024), a clear nod to the lupine goddess Moro in the dark fantasy epic “Princess Mononoke.”
There is poetry and urgency in Planet of Lana and Neva, which successfully internalize Ghibli’s sensibilities. To varyingly gruesome degrees, each is a meditation on humanity’s growing estrangement from nature.
It is more common for games to superficially crib from the studio’s visual qualities, said Michael Leader, host of the “Ghibliotheque” podcast and a co-author of “An Unofficial Guide to the World of Studio Ghibli.” But the inclusion of edifying tea shops and ostensibly soothing labor reflects a misreading of its work, like the recent ChatGPT filter that could transform any image into a faux-Miyazaki movie still.
“Ghibli has been flattened into a visual style, flattened into being cozy,” Leader said. “There’s no violence. It’s just everyday stuff.”
The strongest examples of Ghibli-inspired games bristle with quintessentially Miyazaki-esque unease. These titles, like the open-world adventure Sable (2021), routinely star adolescent protagonists in locations on the brink — or even past the point — of environmental cataclysm. Their characters flit between states of childlike wonder and darker, more grown-up feelings. A deep sense of sadness seems to hang in the air; change is afoot as unlikely heroes venture out into imperfect worlds.
A favorite movie of game makers is the Miyazaki picture that directly preceded Ghibli’s formation in 1985: the stunning and strikingly prescient eco-fable “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.” The hero of its title is not just a steely, flight-loving warrior. She is a biologist, nurturing toxic plants that grow wildly through the gullied landscape she calls home.
An image of Nausicaä, exhausted in her garden while grieving for the flora that causes harm to humans, served as an important visual reference for Gareth Damian Martin as they created the adventure game In Other Waters (2020), which also stars a biologist. It shows, they said, how Nausicaä’s politics go beyond “saving the whales” to an unconditional affection for ecology.
“I love how naïve optimism, stubborn strength and debilitating grief are all contained within that image of Nausicaä,” said Damian Martin, noting how Nausicaä seems to embody a distinctly modern gamut of emotions. “Any study of ecology is now marked with a certain sadness because it reveals humanity’s destructive influence.”
The world of the climbing game Jusant (2023) is similarly filled with deftly illustrated environmental discord. Its setting is an arid, dusty landscape where water once flowed abundantly.
During the ascent of a cloud-scraping massif, the game slowly imparts an eco-philosophy of crystalline, Ghibli-esque moral clarity. “We are part of the world: the animals, rocks, everything,” said Mathieu Beaudelin, the game’s co-creative director. The game does not make a distinction between humans and nonhumans: There is simply the “living.”
Jusant and “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” offer inverted searches for meaning. Nausicaä plunges into a subterranean realm to find clean air and a thriving ecology; Jusant’s androgynous alpinist (whose caped silhouette bears the influence of the Ashitaka from “Princess Mononoke”) ascends upward.
At one point in Jusant, the mountaineer ventures inside the towering massif, discovering a cavernous habitat whose twinkling bioluminescent blues and gauzy purples evoke the toxic jungle of Nausicaä’s planet. In each instance, answers are uncovered by peeking above the clouds and below the soil — by moving through a landscape.
Less dramatic but no less profound are the revelations of 10-year-old Chihiro as she takes the train at the end of “Spirited Away.” As the youngster looks out at the watery vista, the image occasionally cutting to ghostly figures disembarking, the viewer keenly senses her emotions. It is a feeling, said Kevin Griffith Sullivan, the creative director of Season: A Letter to the Future (2023), that arrives as you are growing out of childhood, “when you start to understand the vastness of the world.”
Sullivan hoped to convey precisely this emotion throughout the bittersweet bicycle journey of the teenager Estelle, who with a camera and audio recorder can preserve the sights and sounds of a lushly forested valley for future generations. Like Chihiro, Nausicaä and even 4-year-old Mei in “My Neighbor Totoro,” Estelle is a born observer. “Paying attention to things is a reward in itself,” Sullivan said, adding, “It causes the world to feel more coherent.”
Ghibli movies are not devoid of action or suffering. Think of the head-severing, arm-eviscerating early sequence in “Princess Mononoke” or the bloodied, embalmed bodies in “Grave of the Fireflies.” Yet it is rare for starring characters to wield weapons, lest they actually solve anything with them.
A pacifist and environmentalist, Miyazaki prefers that his characters exercise a more thoughtful, conscientious ethos.
The approach is distilled in “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” whose characters busy themselves with distinctly video game undertakings: looking, exploring, hiding, delivering, flying. Caravan SandWitch (2024) is filled with similar activities, in an open-world game in miniature inspired by its makers’ childhoods spent in Southern France, playing in the Provence countryside.
The game aimed to eschew the “predatory posture” of blockbuster action-adventures, said the creative director Émi Lefèvre, namely a trend of titles casting you as a “white man in a big environment that you can conquer.” Instead, its protagonist, Sauge, scavenges electronic modules from the abandoned machines of a mining corporation, repurposing tools of extraction for the close-knit community she grew up in.
Sauge returning to her home planet is the game’s masterstroke, giving the exploratory action a wistful emotional flavor. She seems to exist in two time zones at once, simultaneously exploring a landscape decimated by invasive industry while excavating memories of a more innocent time.
It is tempting to speculate what Miyazaki would make of these video games. (Studio Ghibli said its artists were not available to comment.) He is a vociferous critic of mass-produced entertainment, including, somewhat ironically, manga, animation and video games, which he has said “assault” young people. He is skeptical of what results when “make-believe experiences” are combined with “commercial interests.”
Miyazaki’s unorthodox working method — imagining, scripting and storyboarding large parts of a movie after it goes into full production — might explain the languid flow of Ghibli pictures, the way their meaning seems to unfurl alongside the discoveries of their characters. Unlike Disney movies, their emotional crescendos are not easily predicted; they arrive in unexpected bursts as part of what Sullivan calls an “undiluted transmission of feeling.”
So perhaps Miyazaki would approve of the way the best Ghibli-inspired games encourage curiosity-led play, allowing players to uncover meaning at their own pace.
Season: A Letter to the Future takes such an approach to an extreme, so unassuming that much of its core gameplay loop — taking photos and making field recordings — is essentially optional. The player can choose to mostly freewheel all the way to the game’s elegiac end, stopping only occasionally to chat with inhabitants before pushing off on Estelle’s bicycle again. Sullivan said he hoped to “let players generate meaning from their actions without the game deciding whether or not those actions were meaningful.”
What makes Ghibli movies special, said Leader, the “Ghibliotheque” host, is that they feel as if “you’re having this one-to-one meeting of minds with an actual person.” Not with a corporate committee, the results of an audience research group or artificial intelligence.
The best Ghibli-inspired games feel the same: like expressions of their players’ psyches. Within these fantasy realms, players move beyond mere escapism by embarking on imaginative, inspirational journeys of their own.
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