Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked

Miyazaki drew or retouched nearly 80,000 of this 1997 epic's cels himself, and it briefly stood as Japan's highest-grossing film until Titanic knocked it off. The opening boar attack — a demon god wrapped in writhing black worms, cursing Ashitaka's arm — announces that nobody here gets to be simply a villain. San, Lady Eboshi, even the forest are all right at once, and that refusal to pick sides is why it takes the top slot.

Isao Takahata adapted Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical 1967 short story into the most devastating thing the studio ever released — and Japanese audiences first met it double-billed with Totoro in April 1988, an act of programming madness. The Sakuma fruit-drop tin, refilled with river water and finally with ash, does more with one prop than most war films manage in two hours. Second because one viewing lasts you a lifetime.

Yes, the consensus number one sits third — on purpose, and you have a vote button to correct it. It won Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards in 2003, the first hand-drawn, non-English-language film to do so, and it held Japan's box-office record for nearly two decades. The silent train ride across the flooded sea, Chihiro seated beside No-Face, is still the studio's most perfect stretch of film. Third anyway: Mononoke argues harder.

Half the planet knows the silhouette — Totoro later became Studio Ghibli's official logo — which is a strange afterlife for a film that opened on the same 1988 bill as Grave of the Fireflies. The bus-stop scene in the rain, Totoro borrowing an umbrella and thrilling at raindrops drumming on it, is patience played as spectacle, and nothing chases the sisters except their own fear about their mother. Fourth feels almost rude. Argue with me.

Takahata's final film before his death in 2018 turns a tenth-century folktale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, into charcoal-sketch animation that looks like it is being drawn while you watch. Kaguya's midnight flight from the mansion — the line work fraying into furious scribbles as she runs — is the studio's single most expressive sequence. Oscar-nominated at the 87th Academy Awards in 2015, and parked fifth here to start the fight properly.

Yoshifumi Kondo directed only this before his death in 1998, and it plays like a whole career compressed into one film. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay, but the temperature is Kondo's: junior-high crushes, library cards, a Tokyo suburb mapped street by street. The violin-shop jam session — Shizuku singing her rewritten Country Roads while the old men wander in with lute and tambourine — earns more joy than any flying sequence in the catalogue. Sixth, and climbing.

Mamoru Hosoda was originally set to direct this Diana Wynne Jones adaptation before quitting the project, and Miyazaki took the shelved film over — a handover you can feel in its lurching dream-logic plot. Watch how Sophie's curse slips: her age drifts younger whenever she forgets to be afraid, an animation choice that carries the whole romance without dialogue. Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 78th Academy Awards in 2006. The war subplot wobbles; the castle walks anyway.

Commissioned as a short in-flight film for Japan Airlines, it grew into a 1992 feature about a bounty-hunting pilot who turned himself into a pig — the closest Miyazaki has come to a self-portrait. The cloud-graveyard story, Marco recalling dead aviators climbing toward a white band of planes above the Adriatic, is the studio's best five minutes on survival. A middle-aged movie in the best sense, ranked eighth over several childhood favourites on purpose.

Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno voices Jiro, a casting stunt that works because his flat, unactorly delivery suits a man who only comes alive around wings. Announced as Miyazaki's farewell in 2013 — a retirement he later reversed for The Boy and the Heron — and Oscar-nominated in 2014. The Great Kanto earthquake, the ground swelling like a sea while the sound design groans with human voices, is the most frightening passage in any Ghibli film. Troubling, gorgeous, ninth.

Adapted from Eiko Kadono's 1985 novel, it changed hands mid-production: Miyazaki was meant to produce and took over directing from Sunao Katabuchi. It remains the studio's best film about work — burnout, rendered as a thirteen-year-old losing the ability to fly. The dirigible rescue, Kiki wobbling across the sky on a borrowed deck brush she can barely steer, sticks the landing precisely because her powers do not. Tenth is respectable; her partisans will riot anyway.

Japan's top-grossing domestic film of 1991 then waited a quarter century for an American theatrical run, arriving via GKIDS in 2016 — a drama about a 27-year-old office worker was apparently unsellable. Takahata cuts between Taeko's Tokyo present and her fifth-grade memories, and the pineapple scene — the family ceremonially slicing an exotic fruit that turns out bland — says everything about 1966 Japan in three minutes. Adult, unhurried, and better than half the films above it.

Released in Japan in July 2023 with no trailer, no synopsis and nothing but a single poster, it went on to win Best Animated Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards, making Miyazaki, at 83, the category's oldest winner. The warawara ascent — hundreds of little white spirits floating up to be born while pelicans dive at them — is prime late-Miyazaki: gorgeous, morbid, unexplained. Twelfth because it is a summation rather than a peak. Recency bias cuts both ways.

Everything started here: Studio Ghibli's first feature, released in August 1986, arrived with the house grammar already complete — airships, orphans, a floating city, a villain in tinted glasses. The derelict robot soldier tending Laputa's overgrown garden, birds nesting on its shoulders, is the moment the adventure movie turns melancholy. Thirteenth for a founding text will read as sacrilege, and that is what the vote button is for. The middle hour sags; the last twenty minutes soar.

For this 2008 film Ghibli closed its computer-graphics section to put everything into hand-drawn animation, and you can see the wager in every frame of ocean. Ponyo sprinting across the storm waves — each swell a live fish the size of a bus, keeping pace with a speeding car — is the most kinetic sequence the studio ever drew. The plot dissolves into warm salt water by the end; with drawing like this, who is counting? Fourteenth, joyfully.

Hiromasa Yonebayashi's second feature moves Joan G. Robinson's 1967 novel from Norfolk to Hokkaido and loses nothing in transit. Anna is the studio's loneliest protagonist — asthmatic, adopted, furious at herself — and the grain-silo confession in the storm, two girls shouting a decades-old abandonment into the wind, lands the reveal honestly. Oscar-nominated in 2016, and the last film Yonebayashi directed at Ghibli before leaving for Studio Ponoc. Quietly devastating; fifteenth undersells it.

Shape-shifting tanuki wage an environmental resistance campaign against suburban development, testicle gags and all — and it was Japan's number-one domestic film of 1994 and the country's Oscar submission that year. Takahata plays it as mockumentary, which makes the ending land harder: the ghost parade through the new town, one last spectacular haunting that residents dismiss as a theme-park stunt. Nothing else in the catalogue swings between slapstick and grief this fast. Sixteenth flatters nothing; it is that strange.

Mary Norton's 1952 novel The Borrowers becomes a study in scale: raindrops land like water balloons, a human heartbeat is a sound-design event, and a sewing pin makes a respectable sword. Hiromasa Yonebayashi made his directing debut here in 2010, and the first borrowing expedition — Arrietty scaling the kitchen with double-sided tape and rappelling for a sugar cube — is a heist sequence staged at ten centimetres tall. Released in America as The Secret World of Arrietty. Slight, but flawlessly built.

Father and son finally collaborated without visible bloodshed: Goro Miyazaki directed, Hayao co-wrote the screenplay with Keiko Niwa, and the crew finished it through the rolling blackouts after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, animating at night to dodge the power cuts. Umi raising her signal flags over the harbour every morning — a ritual for a father lost at sea — gives the film its spine. A modest 1963 Yokohama romance whose nostalgia sits lightly. Eighteenth, pleasantly.

Not a purely Japanese production: Ghibli co-produced this 2016 fable with French partners including Wild Bunch, and Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit directed — the only feature in the catalogue made outside the studio's walls. There is not one line of dialogue, and the raft sequence — a castaway's escape smashed from below by something unseen — builds real dread from pure pantomime. Oscar-nominated at the 89th Academy Awards in 2017. A parable rather than a story; it lingers like weather.

Advertised as Ghibli's first entirely digital film — though in practice only the colouring stage was fully computerised — Takahata's 1999 adaptation of Hisaichi Ishii's comic strip Nono-chan threw out the house style for watercolour doodles. The opening wedding-speech fantasia, the newlyweds bobsledding down their own wedding cake into open sea, announces a film that runs on metaphor and four-panel timing. The loosest, warmest thing Takahata ever made. Vote it up if you have actually seen it.

A spin-off of Whisper of the Heart built around the Baron, the dapper cat figurine, it is the only film Hiroyuki Morita ever directed for the studio, released in 2002. The midnight cat procession — hundreds of cats on hind legs marching Haru off to a feline kingdom she accidentally got engaged into — is the image everyone keeps. Light as a paper crane and perfectly aware of it, a palate cleanser between heavyweights. Twenty-first is not an insult here.

Strictly a television movie — it premiered on Nippon TV on May 5, 1993, and only reached North American cinemas via GKIDS in 2016 — it stays on this list because Ghibli made it, the same test that admits Earwig. Director Tomomi Mochizuki and a young crew mostly in their twenties were meant to prove they could work fast and cheap, and famously went over budget and over schedule. The platform glance at Kichijoji station ends it perfectly. Modest, and quietly grown-up.

Goro Miyazaki's directorial debut arrived with the toughest review attached: Ursula K. Le Guin told him it was not her book but his movie — adding, politely, that it was a good one — then later made her disappointment public. The opening dragon fight above a grey sea promises a wilder film than the mopey one delivered in 2006. Handsome backgrounds, borrowed plot, a lead who stabs his father in the first act and never gets interesting about it. Second-to-last, fairly.

Last place needs explaining: it counts because Ghibli produced it — the same test that keeps Ocean Waves in — but it premiered on NHK television on December 30, 2020, ahead of a 2021 Japanese theatrical run, and it swapped the studio's pencils for full 3D CG, a first. Goro Miyazaki directs a second Diana Wynne Jones adaptation, and the spell-grinding montage in Bella Yaga's workroom is the CG's strongest stretch. Its catchiest element is the closing rock song. Vote honestly.