Why studio Ghibli's love stories slap really hard

I like the modern Disney stuff. Frozen, Brave, Moana… But what about ~love~?

I got HBO Max and have been binge rewatching Studio Ghibli films ever since.

Studio Ghibli is a Japanese studio known for its delicate, hand-drawn, animated features. Films beautiful in every way a film can be beautiful. The plots are exciting and instigating, the sound invites you to explore worlds filled with magic. Every movie is a dive into fascinating external and internal universes, punctuated by magical elements originated in different parts of the world, but most frequently, Japanese mythology.

The characters face sadness, loss, anger, they are capable of growth and bare flaws - something Disney princesses, who are at most “overly caring perfectionists”, do not seem to possess. Films like “Howl’s moving castle“, “The Cat Returns“ and “My Neighbor Totoro“ deal with loss, brotherhood, friendship and other incredible corners of the human soul. Modernity’s erasure of traditional culture, the price of duty, coping mechanisms as a way to process loss – all those topics have made their mark in different features… Love being the most consistent theme.

Because, like Pixar, they do not minimize children’s capacity to understand narrative, but unlike the American studio, Ghibli is not afraid to create stories where its child, at times teenage, protagonists, deeply care about someone else outside of their family. Care so much they would risk their own personal safety. Care so profoundly, they would move to the spirit or to the human world, if that meant sharing life with a person they l_v_ very much. (Did you get the word? I’m not going to tell you).

In the Studio Ghibli films, from Spirited Away to Whisper of the Heart, from Princess Mononoke to Porco Rosso the characters have desires, ambitions and internal arcs of their own. They are all also moved by love.

In various degrees of platonic, the relationship between the characters unfold in a very different way from any Disney creations. Chihiro or Shizuko are not Cinderella or Snow White, they have their own goals, dreams and yet… Love feels their world with magic. They discover themselves by loving someone else, a feature so seemingly trivial and yet so uniquely underrepresented in Children’s media.

Watching a Studio Ghibli film transports you to a journey of grounded empathy and real feelings while cruising in magic realms. That is exactly what love feels like.

Don’t get me wrong, I admire Disney’s attempt to go away from the classic princess-finds-love-and-therefore-is-happy-forever thing, but there are grey areas here Disney hasn’t explored yet. Or Pixar. Or DreamWorks. Or Universal.

The Ghibli animation studio has succeeded in talking about love beyond the will-they-or-won’t-they tired dichotomy. The love stories exist because the protagonists change for the best through a human connection that feels magic. Isn’t that what love, any love, is?

I haven’t seen any movie from the Japanese studio in which the protagonists kiss, get married or live a traditional happily-ever-after, but their connection is portrayed in a way that feels stronger than most love stories, be it live action or animation. They are definitely not just friends too.

Teenagehood is the time most of us discover love. It is the time we also find people who seem to like us inside our new sense of self. Ghibli captures, in it’s almost always teenage female protagonists, the cyclical search for oneself and the unique feeling of finding, often through love, belonging in an age of solitude.

It proves that there is so much more to love stories than what Disney makes them out to be. I honest to God do not care if the characters in Howl’s Moving Castle or The Cat Returns ever see each other again. The important thing is that they had each other for a pivotal moment that made the characters change and grow. What else could be more realistic and yet, simply fantastic?