1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli (2023)
ghibli.jp
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https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/marnie004.jpg
https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/ponyo005.jpg
https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/ged023.jpg
https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/majo002.jpg
https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/totoro001.jpg
https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/laputa037.jpg
https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/umi003.jpg
Sometimes they arrive after much adventure. Sometimes arriving is a discovery. Sometimes it's not an end but the beginning of something. Sometimes it's a departure. They all look forward, taking us with them, into whatever awaits.
Which one is that? Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind?
edit: No the castle in that looks nothing like it.
I guess you need to dare to have all those full blown hits, which might disappoint from time to time.
Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa are two of my top ten films. I'd do anything to have Miyazaki make one more.
I even bought Miramax's old marketing website and kept it online [1].
I was lucky enough to teach English in Hokkaido [2], which is where Ghibli animators drew inspiration for Princess Mononoke. It's such a beautiful place, and you can feel it in the film.
[1] http://www.princess-mononoke.com/ (I should get SSL certs but I haven't touched it in years.)
What about "The Wind Rises"?
He's "retired" like 3 times now, you might not have to do very much.
However, it couldn't just be a sequel of the movie, as it diverged from the manga story line near the end.
So in case someone comes to this without previous exposure Nausicaa may not be the best place to start. It _is_ nice.
Depending on how it's hosted, giving it a letsencrypt certificate isn't too much of a hassle. I'd be happy to help.
That’s awesome, private sale or did they let it drop?
Edit: someone apparently did - https://www.tumblr.com/three-thousand-worlds/169781667311/st...
Where should I begin? I have kids in the 10-15 year old bracket if people think they'd make a good family experience.
If looking for "adventure" go with Laputa, Cagliostro, maybe Porco Rosso.
If looking for something "warm" go with Totoro, Kiki, Ponyo.
If looking for something more "fantastical" (probably also more complex) try Howl's, Spirited Away, Nausicaä, Mononoke.
If you are willing to consider a TV show, then Sherlock Hound is really fun and delightful in every possible way. The complete series is IIRC 26 episodes.
Also, there are some non-Miyazaki but still Ghibli films which you may want to consider too. Personally, I absolutely love Mimi wo Sumaseba and I can hear the sea, but these may well be a bit uninteresting for a 10 year old; better for a teen probably over 15 I'd guess. Pompoko is clearly recommended for your age bracket though, and it's fun too.
Finally, there's the question of Grave of the Fireflies. I think 15 is probably fine, 10... maybe. But in any case, be warned that it's a very sad story and I have very rarely met someone who could watch it without crying profusely.
In any case you're in for an adventure!
I’d add Kiki’s Delivery Service to the ‘mostly fun’ side as well
Spirited away
Howls moving castle
Princess Mononoke
Castle in the sky
NausicaaI also find myself quoting porco rosso a lot lately.
This a treasure trove of gorgeous lockscreen images. Very excited to put them into rotation.
Personally I would disagree!
AI has the effect of making whatever it creates feel worthless. Something AI made says “this wasn’t worth spending any time on. It’s not something important ” Seeing something you care about become part of that Sucks.
I see value (or lack of it) in what I have in front of me, not in how much a person had to struggle and suffer for it to come into existence.
Either something is good or it’s not. Creating something good can sometimes take a lot of effort, but it’s not the effort that makes it good. Otherwise digging a hole and filling it back up would be a valuable undertaking.
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2019/03/painting-backgroun...
The lights in windows on the background of Akira, for example, were painstakingly painted one by one. That takes skill. That is impressive. It’s the kind of work that makes one with an appreciation for art (which goes beyond “pretty picture”) take another look and imagine what the artist was feeling and thinking as they were working. It makes you wonder about exact techniques and how to improve them, how to create something new.
All of that enhances the appreciation for the movie. The craft, the skill, the sweat put into it to make a hard and grandiose vision plays into how good and influential it has become.
Had those buildings just been spit out by gen AI along with everything else, there would be no value to taking a second look. You’d probably be looking at distorted images anyway, and even if you weren’t it’d just be a bunch of pixels with no intentionality to it. If no one put effort into the details, there’s no reason to look at them. The converse is also true.
But if a machine can replicate mechanically what takes a human effort and ingenuity to do, a human doing the same thing through effort and ingenuity doesn’t magically add further value. And this is understood quite universally; that’s why no human practices the craft of multiplying large numbers anymore.
This is what AI art supporters fail to understand because few if any of them actually practice the craft they emulate. They tend to only work with code and algorithms for which there is no fundamental human expression involved. They assume that because apart from rote intellect and memory the human experience is meaningless in regards to coding as they are acting merely a means of inputting instructions into a machine, that the human experience is equally meaningless for all creative endeavors.
However the value lies not in the technical aspects of craft as an end (which, mind you, no AI is actually good at yet) but as a means of expressing the human experience of an artist and their relationship to the viewer. That dialogue isn't something an LLM can replicate because by definition humanity isn't something an LLM can experience. And even if perfectly mastered on a technical level, it wouldn't have the same value as human expression just as a skillful forgery doesn't have the same value as an original.
Everything humans do can be replicated mechanically. We’re biological machines, and crafts are just behaviors, not some mystical feat that somehow defies replication or analysis. And there can be no reasonable doubt that machines will replicate (and indeed surpass) everything human very soon.
That doesn't require any argument from mysticism, just an understanding that the context of humanity has value for most humans (perhaps not you, but most humans) beyond the pure transactional mechanisms of value creation, stimulus and response.
Like, I love blog posts. Really do, I’ll read anyone’s about anything. Someone thought of something and cared about it and put it into the world and that’s wonderful.
But someone making an AI post doesn’t care. And worse, it makes anyone who does care feel silly, like, why am I wasting my time on this thing that’s so worthless that whatever the first thing the computer spits out is good enough for them
But there's a big difference between prompting and accepting the first output versus someone using search, multiple LLMs, actually READING the underlying papers, and iterating until it's done.
Sometimes that still means getting to 'done' faster than by more traditional means. Sometimes it means more depth than you'd manage otherwise. Sometimes somewhere in between.
Of course, by that point, either way, it doesn't really look like lazy AI output anymore.
Maybe it's not so much about the tools/agents as it is about the intent-to-engage behind them?
It’s the stuff where, if the creator couldn’t be bothered to care about the details why should I? And most gen ai art is that way
Would Spirited Away no longer be a good film?
So your question isn't whether Ghibli had an AI, but whether Ghibli had a whole time traveling machine with it.
Your question feels like asking whether Einstein, Plato, etc. were secretly time travelers and copied someone else's style.
Something that is a general problem with all GenAI is that they copy and imitate. And just like with code being messy and dumb you'll find that Stable Diffusion in pieces of art does stupid and dumb stuff. Things it wasn't trained on. You can most prominently see that in big detailed fantasy (as in not just a photo) pictures, and looking at details. While the overall thing "looks cool" you don't get the details that artists do and you notice a lot of silly, dumb and what for a human author would be a "strange thing to invest time in and still do so badly" kind of situation.
I'd argue if we had AI in the sense that it had actually understood things and it could actually show creativity, etc. the story might be different, but as of today it is unknown whether that's possible. It would make sense, just like alien life would make a lot of sense. But for both actually thinking systems and alien life we have no clue how close we are to seeing one.
Every time someone takes an unbiased look at it (and there are many papers) it is shown that there is no understanding of anything, which to be fair is far from surprising given what the "training" (which is just a term that is an allegory and something that is kinda simulated, but also not really).
There might very well be hard and pretty obvious limitations, such as to feel and express like a human you need to be a human or provide away to simulate that and if you look at biology, anatomy, medicine, etc. you'll soon realize that even if we had technical means to do so we simply don't know most things yet, otherwise we could likely make Alzheimer, artificial brains, etc.
The topic then might be aside from all the ethical parts (when does something have human rights), whether a superhuman as all the futurists believe there will be even be able to create something of value to a regular human or are the experiences just too different. It can already be hard to get anything out of art you cannot relate to other than general analytical interest. However on that side of things Spirited Away already might be on the "little value" side.
This isn't to defend human creation per se, but to counter often completely off understanding of what GenAI is and does.
One final comparison: We already have huge amounts of people capable of reproducing Gibli and other art. Their work might be devalued (even though I'd assume some art their own stuff into their work).
People don't buy a Picasso, because they can't find a copy or a print that even has added benefits such as requiring as much care, being cheaper. Einstein isn't unimportant today, because you learn about his work in school or on Wikipedia.
But your question is like asking whether Einstein's work would be without value, if he secretly had Wikipedia.
Eh, maybe it got trained on Nausicaä, and then a lot of prompting and manual touch up work was used to adapt the style to what we now know as Spirited Away. Or maybe that animation department wasn't completely for show and they did draw some reference frames, but the AI figured out everything in between.
I don't really want to get into a discussion about the theoretical limits of AI, because I don't know what they are and I don't think anyone does. But if "the process is important for art," what happens if the creator lies about the process? If you initially experience the art without knowing about the lie, does learning the truth retroactively erase your previous experience? How does that make sense?
It has always seemed more logical to me that the final piece ought to be all that matters when evaluating art, and any details you know about the creator or process should be ignored to the greatest extent possible. That's difficult to do in many cases, but it can be a goal. I'm also aware that lots of people disagree with me on this.
There is literally no universe in which a generative AI creates a work of art of that magnitude. You can get "make this meme is the style of Ghibli" from an AI and it can imitate the most facile properties of the style but that still requires the style to imitate. AI is never going to generate the genius of Hayao Miyazaki from first principles, that isn't even possible.
Look at Google Gemini and how it's accepted. The only two differences between it and the rest is that it's made by Google, and they don't brag about disrupting the society or damaging its workings(Google do disrupt the society and damage its workings).
It's one thing to design a shotgun, it's another to give it a commercial name "Street Sweeper". The latter is asking to be treated unfairly. Torrenting bunch of media contents and brandishing the runnable blobs as weapons that kill all $classes_of_good_people just isn't and never was the way you communicate anything to anyone.
it's like that
They are one of the best, most popular and influential animation studios ever. That you had never heard of them suggests you have little to no interest in animation, which is perfectly fine but also means you’re not their target audience.
I’ve been on a Ghibli binge this week because my wife can’t believe that I’ve never watched any of their films so we’ve watched 1 a day. I wasn’t intentionally avoiding them, they just didn’t seem interesting based on the few clips I’ve seen. Having watched a few, my opinion is unchanged. I enjoyed them, I just don’t ‘get’ the craze.
While the films are generally beautifully animated, I simply couldn’t get into the stories nor understand why they’re so highly acclaimed. I say this as an anime fan and a fairly typical otaku.
The stories don’t really have a proper conclusion, it’s often a pattern of a thing happened, let’s undo the thing, life goes on.
The Japanese voice acting is often quite bad as Miyazaki seems to have a very thing against using professional voice actors.
The music’s cool though.
- Nausica
- Raputa
- Totoro
- Mononoke
- Spirited away
- Howl
>The stories don’t really have a proper conclusion, it’s often a pattern of a thing happened, let’s undo the thing, life goes on.
One could say this about Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and even Evangelion too.
I personally think that Ghibli is popular because it gives a sense of nostalgia, a beautiful depiction of nature and it feels alive because the care that goes in to the background and background characters movement.
It feel less like a theater, a story crafted to entertain, and more just like a snapshot of life of someone/something that will go on after the movie ends.
Also as for music. If you watched the American version, they've actually changed many scenes and added additional music. Disney said that American populace couldn't watch a scene where no music is present for happens for more than 3 min so they had to add some extra music. [1]
That’s definitely something I felt the whole time. They’re anime for non-anime fans.
Story-wise, Gits and Akira do have a kind of logical story progression. I don’t understand Eva too. Cool visuals though.
Let’s take Princess Mononoke as an example. The Main Character goes west in search for something, discovers a Japanese Industrial Revolution underway led by some lady Eboshi. Eboshi and tall shoes guy kill a god, causing massive death and destruction, but they returned the god’s head at the end and suddenly everything is forgiven. Mononoke’s adopted mom is dead, several tribes of boars are dead, thousands of people are dead, the industrious village is destroyed and large numbers of their inhabitants sent to die in an ambush by their own boss but it’s all OK, because the people that started it ended it by returning something they stole. What?
Similar thoughts for Raputa and Howl.
It's a story of conflict and mistakes. Do you watch a history movie about WW1 and also get perplexed "and then they did WW2, What?". As said, it's not a story about linear start-end like theater. It's a snapshot of a historical event.
And the idea is not industrial revolution. The idea is that tatara village is a sanctuary for the outcast. The place is for prostitutes and slaves that fled. Eboshi, is presented as this opportunistic woman but also simultaneously presented as a savior that even accommodate lepers. During the story, the village is also attacked by Samurais; the outer world "lords" that shunned the outcasts, and now that they're successful, come to ask for tithe. Something the village shuns by shooting at the emissary. This leads to war. The Eboshi is desperate and contact the Buddhist monk and get a formar letter from the emperor to hunt for the god, to gain legitimacy and protection.
The nature, Shishigami, doesn't care. They explicitly say that in the end. It's the process of nature and doesn't choose sides. and really, for everyone to move on, in a harsh world, is to be "OK" with what happened. This is more realistic than some story of tragedy or revenge that have an "end of history" synonymous as "the end of the story". Life goes on.
Miyazaki have been anti industrial, pro nature all his life. But, he also admits that industry is helping humans. The tatara village is just that. They are "evil" from mononoke and forest spirits point of view, but they're the down trodden, desperate that finally built a place for them.
The point of the movie is that Ashitaka, the outsider, that comes from a dying tribe in Japan peninsula, realize that his deadly curse is not caused by monochrome "evil, selfish people" or "revengeful nature". But that everyone (except the samurai and monks) have their reasons for the actions, and that lead to conflict. That in the end, would lead to destruction and the only way to live is to coexist.
The story of coexistence START at the end of the movie. Which is ofc underwhelming to watcher if you want a definitive answer of "will it work? Is this happy ever after? Who won? Whose story is this". The anser is "we don't know, we don't know, and the story is the event that transpired".
Most ghibli stories (that are actually written by Miyazaki) follow similar patterns. History continues
For a practical advice, I'd suggest watching either The Wind Rises (if you want strictly Miyazaki) or Only Yesterday (if any Ghibli is fine) next. Neither will have the strict conclusion that you are looking for, but they both are more "adult" films that are similar to Western dramas so you might find your brain is more accepting of that. At the very least you might find them more relatable than his other films and their child protagonists; I think The Wind Rises should speak well to any tech worker these days.
For less useful advice: it wasn't until I had an apartment high enough that I could see the skyline over the trees did I begin to understand why artists painted clouds the colors they did[2]. All art is holding a mirror up to nature, sometimes you gotta touch grass before you can get it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu
[1] Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso are my favourite Ghibli films, but Totoro I think is the greatest children's movie of all time and one of the few films capable of reminding someone what being a child is really like. I never got into Spirited Away or Howls Moving Castle though.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Levitan_Evening_bells_189...
I don't know how to navigate this website and if it even contains the backgrounds only. Does it have those, are Ghibli movie backgrounds available anywhere else?
I wish they were remastered in 4K, though.
I'm not claiming it's a good thing by any means but there's no point in worrying about it, the paperclip maximizer has done its work.
Perhaps allowing them to find the positives in new technologies.
Or, you know... Slop.
An open mind doesn't hurt though.
How many pieces of AI art can you actually remember? I mean, call to mind in the same detail as you can remember a photograph?
I think AI generated imagery is fundamentally compromised somehow in this regard: something subliminally uncanny, no matter how realistic, makes them harder to recall.
For this reason I personally doubt AI generated art will ever have a profound effect on people. Because it really seems to lack the mechanism.
If the medium is the message, then the message of any AI production is that the correct amount of time to care about this thing is zero seconds.
It may be, I concede, that I see more AI-generated photos than other art types (AI generated photo fraud is a serious issue in a corner of the web I frequent) but I tend to find that I literally can't remember what they look like long after I see them.
Same exercise, focussing on faces specifically:
- try to visualise Taylor Swift's face. Or that of Rachel Weisz or Ming-Na Wen, or Sarah Silverman, or Alfre Woodard.
- now try to visualise the face of Tilly Norwood.
Obviously if you don't know who any of these people are, you can't do this exercise (which is why I included Taylor Swift). And if you don't know what Tilly Norwood is, you can't do this exercise.
But if you've seen a lot of content about Tilly Norwood, can you visualise the face in the same way? Is it memorable? It is not.
It is my contention that these images actually have something very undefinable missing, that my brain needs to find them worth memorising. I have seen many "AI models" now and I can't remember any of "their" faces.