Unless you are living in a forest, away from ‘un-civilization’, among the company of birds & beasts, you would have experimented with the steaming hot trend of people morphing their pictures into a Ghibli Studioesque animation, courtesy of OpenAI.
It didn’t even take us a hot minute to trend it across social media and WhatsApp groups. Now there are valid concerns about the ethics of stealing something as laborious & timeless as Studio Ghibli properties, using AI to plagiarize human artistic skills and the environmental concerns around using groundwater for cooling down the prompt inundated melting Chat GPT servers.
But this post is not about that.
It is about something personal. It is about the emotions that Studio Ghibli movies sparked and continue to spark in me.
I first watched Spirited Away when I was down with Jaundice during my post-grads and had to watch it a second time to absorb its magnificence fully. Here was someone making movies for the weird ones and I was just then discovering them.
Next logical step was obviously to explore other movies from Studio Ghibli- but mind you, I am talking about a time before Netflix set shop in India, and I didn’t get to experience the luminance of Hayako Miyazaki that year, or the year next. And then I forgot all about him and his Studio.
Life happens at it does and I grew up along with my pre frontal cortex. I fell in love with writing, then fell out of love, and then back again- never knowing about another marvel of a movie that mirrored this part human- part magical experience of burnout.
I have been putting off writing on this blog and wrapping up my novel for months now. Even when I write, I do it with half a heart and mind.
But thanks ( grudgingly) to the ChatGPTfication of Studio Ghibli, I found my way back to it.
Kiki’s Flying Delivery Service was my first revisit to the Studio and I ended up happy crying while watching it.
Kiki is a young witch, all of thirteen years old, who decides to live by herself for a year and put her skills to use in a faraway land. Accompanying her is Gigi, her familiar feline. He looks to be an adolescent cat but like all cats, he is just a baby.
So, they hop onto a broomstick and find a little place and set their shop. The movie is such a happy thing and warms you up and makes you yearn for no judgemental town like that where flying witches are not condemned but welcomed.
Calling it a sucker punch of a movie would be an understatement. It lays bare the limits of human endurance in a war-torn world. It tells the story of two orphaned siblings, a symbolic future of post-bombing Japan, and how a world led by selfish, despotic adults can fail the most vulnerable.
Though some dispute the author’s stance on war, the overwhelming takeaway is this: the human cost of conflict is unbearable.
After weeping for half a day over it, I turned to Howl’s Moving Castle and this one was decisevely less bleak and had more of a fantastically pacifist plot, thanks to Miyazaki, but the eccentric in me loved it.
Howl’s castle is anti-war too, just a little alchemical in the way it’s revealed, and there’s romance and lots of magic, an adorable fire demon and a very chivalrous scarecrow- what’s not to love?
The list of Ghibli movies is endless like the sky in Laputa. Thanks to a fiery bunch of filmmakers, contains diverse voices which reflect beautifully in the plot and the treatment of films, and even though they represent an animated, golden-hued world, the themes explored in those remain deeply relevant even today.
Next on my list- Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro.
So, while I strongly object to the AI-fication of Studio Ghibli’s art, I can’t help but give credit to the craze that nudged me back to the wonderful world it sustains.
Ah, the dichotomy of the human condition.
Fingers in symphony 