Sightlines · a viewing thread

The Studio Ghibli Canon

A run through the whole hand-drawn shelf of Miyazaki and Takahata — start with the childhood-wonder crowd-pleasers and drift toward the studio's quieter, adult, more elegiac corners.

Beloved almost universally and endlessly rewatchable; the marquee titles ask nothing of a newcomer, while the Takahata films and the late elegies reward viewers ready for something slower and sadder.

• Spirited Away (2001)
• My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
• Ponyo (2008)
• The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (2013)
• Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
• Princess Mononoke (1997)
• Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
• The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)
• Castle in the Sky (1986)
• Only Yesterday (1991)
• When Marnie Was There (2014)
• The Wind Rises (2013)
• Warriors of the Wind (1984) — The film that founded the studio, hiding under its butchered dub title — Miyazaki's toxic-jungle ecological epic Nausicaä is the first draft of Princess Mononoke, and the one canon entry you skipped because the name looked wrong.
• Porco Rosso (1992) — The overlooked adult Miyazaki that rhymes with The Wind Rises' love of flight — a WWI ace cursed with a pig's face bounty-hunting sky pirates over the Adriatic, wry and melancholy in the studio's grown-up register.
• The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) — If Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso land, this is the under-seen origin point to finally pull down — Miyazaki's feature debut, a Lupin caper where his whole clockwork-adventure style already runs at full speed.
• From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) — The quiet Ghibli one that sits in the same gentle-memory corner as Only Yesterday — a 1963 Yokohama love story of postwar nostalgia and reclaimed history, easy to forget but purely of this shelf.
• Wolf Children (2012) — The non-Ghibli film that belongs anyway — Hosoda's motherhood-and-folklore fable of raising wolf-children in the countryside rhymes with Totoro's rural wonder and Only Yesterday's tenderness, the heir-apparent gem to finally watch.