Best Studio Ghibli Movies

The bathhouse is a working economy whose rules you learn as Chihiro does, and No-Face is the studio's best monster because he is politeness gone wrong. The one soft spot: after the quiet train ride, every problem resolves a little too easily.

Nothing much happens, and that is the entire design: two sisters, a sick mother, a forest spirit, an afternoon that refuses to end. Viewers who need plot bounce straight off it. As pure feeling, only Kiki's Delivery Service on this list comes close.

The angriest film Miyazaki ever made, and the one where nobody is wrong: Iron Town has real reasons to strip the forest, and the forest has real reasons to kill. The violence narrows who you can show it to, which is the price of taking its war seriously.

Sophie's aging curse is a great fantasy premise and the castle is the studio's best machine. But the second half trades its war story for a hurried reconciliation, and even people who love it admit the plot goes soft exactly when it should tighten.

A young witch's one skill simply stops working, and the film treats that loss with total seriousness. The stakes are smaller than anything else here, and next to Spirited Away's invention it can look slight. That smallness is why people keep rewatching it.

The first film released under the Ghibli name and still the studio's purest adventure: sky pirates, a floating city, a plot that moves like a countdown. What it lacks is Princess Mononoke's ambiguity, since its villain is simply a villain, and it plays a shade thinner for it.

Takahata's firebombing story is the Ghibli film most people cannot bring themselves to watch twice. No magic, no comfort, no interest in letting the audience off the hook, which keeps it out of family rotations even as critics rank it with the great war films.

Made before the studio formally existed, and its success is why Ghibli was founded at all. The poisoned jungle is one of Miyazaki's richest worlds; the ending leans on a prophecy the film has not quite earned, and the manga finishes the thought better.

A Tokyo office worker spends a farm holiday replaying her ten-year-old self, and the childhood flashbacks land with a precision the present-day frame never matches. American theaters did not touch it until 2016, a quarter century after its Japanese release, which says plenty about selling animation made for adults.

Miyazaki doing The Little Mermaid as pure motion, with a wave-running sequence that justifies the whole film and a story so much thinner than Totoro's, the film it clearly wants to be, that adults quietly check out before the end.

A middle-aged pilot with a pig's face flying seaplanes over the Adriatic while fascism gathers just off screen. This is the film closest to Miyazaki's private tastes, which is also its ceiling: children tend to shrug at it, and the curse at its center never gets an answer.

The film Miyazaki came out of retirement to make, and the strangest thing he has done since the seventies. It brought the studio its second animation Oscar, in 2024. The open question is whether its dream logic is profound or merely private, and the slow first hour does not help its case.

Takahata's last film, drawn like a brush painting about to dissolve. The ending hits as hard as anything the studio ever made. Set against Grave of the Fireflies it is the gentler of his two heartbreaks, and its long middle asks for patience it only mostly repays.

A biography of the man who designed the Zero fighter, made by an animator asking whether beautiful machines excuse their uses, and paced so deliberately that it is the one late Miyazaki film nobody recommends first.