When a studio gets nature right...

Studio Ghibli is one of the best when it comes to creating immersive worlds. They put so much efffort into all of their environments, be it Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s delivery service, you name it, they are all known for their beautiful worlds. But for me, if there’s something that Studio Ghibli is the very best at, I believe it is at portraying nature. And in this nature retrospective, I want to explore the luxuriously lazy natural worlds of Studio Ghibli and why they feel much more immersive than Disney? ➤ Chapters 0:00 Princess Mononoke vs Tangled 1:50 The many dimensions of nature 4:32 The sounds of Ghibli’s nature 8:58 ’Biophilia’ in Ghibli 13:48 How culture impacts Cinema 16:12 Shintoism in Ghibli 21:20 The simplicity of Ghibli’s nature (That Ghibli feeling) Well, if you are a Studio Ghibli fan, I pretty sure you must’ve heard of ’that Ghibli feeling’. I feel like there is something magical about their movies that you simply can’t explain them, you can only feel them. And after watching a lot of these movies, I’m convinced that it has got a lot to do with how they portray or animate nature. There’s so much love and affection they put in to their environments that you simply can’t stop caring for them. In this analysis, I look at how this portrayal of nature is impacted by Japanese culture, and how eastern values of shintoism creeps into the nature of Ghibli. And this is something that is entirely absent in western animation such as Disney, where nature is considered more of a background element than things that are alive. I also talk about how nature presents itself as something that heals people, in ’My Neighbor Totoro’, which aligns with the concept of ’biophilia’, and how the frequent usage of ambient natural sounds acts as a medium to connect the viewer to nature. And this is something that you’d probably never see in western animation, where most studios are character-centric. I think animating the natural world has its benefits as it creates beautiful moments of human-nature relationships. And in these moments, Studio Ghibli shows us that the natural world can be portrayed in a movie if your really pay attention to it. And this is one of the biggest reasons why I gravitate to their movies. Because of their appreciation towards the human-nature connection.