Tag: studio ghibli

Arrietty the Borrower

Posted on by NieA_78

As you may recall from my latest installment of Anime A to Z, The Borrower Arrietty is one of my favorite Ghibli films. For me, it’s a “classic” from the studio, much like My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service. Hayao Miyazaki selected Hiromasa Yonebayashi to make his directorial debut with this adaptation of The Borrowers, and it resulted in a wonderful film.

The sense of scale was captured perfectly. You can tell that you’re watching tiny little people in a human-sized world, rather than normal sized people in a giant-sized world. This is especially apparent when water moves at Arrietty’s scale. The film is also very pretty artistically, and the score by harpist Cécile Corbel fits perfectly with the setting.

And then there’s Arrietty herself. She is one of my overall favorite Ghibli leads. Like many of her predecessors, Arrietty is a determined and adventurous girl trying to forge her own way in the world. But unlike her predecessors, she is only a few centimeters tall!

Below are a few fifteen screenshots of Arrietty from the film. It’s more than I would usually put in a post like this, but she is worth it.

Twintails from Earthsea

Posted on by NieA_78

I finally watched Studio Ghibli’s Tales from Earthsea last weekend. As Ghibli films go, it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the studio’s catalogue, but it’s still a good film taken on its own merits. But I am not here to talk about the film right now… this is just one particular thing in it that I thought was interesting.

Meet Therru:

At the very first moment she appeared on the screen, someone else immediately sprung to mind:

Naa?

Clearly, Therru and Misaki have the same hair stylist!

Sophie’s Silver Braid

Posted on by NieA_78

Howl’s Moving Castle may not be the first film you think of when talking about Studio Ghibli or Hayao Miyazaki, but it’s no less worthy of recognition.

Like most Ghibli films, the lead is a self-sufficient young woman, but in the case of this film, eighteen(-ish)-year-old Sophie spends most of her time on screen as a ninety-year-old woman. She finds Howl thanks to a rather helpful scarecrow, and after making a deal with Howl’s fire Calcifer, she tries to find a way to lift the spell cast on her which turned her into an old woman.

While Sophie makes a great feisty old lady, I think she looks rather fetching as her spell begins to wear off, when she regains her youthful face and body, but retains her silver hair from being old. It could be a representation of the experience she gained as an old lady, overcoming hardships in ways she couldn’t have dreamed of before.

Below are a few scenes capturing some of the moments as Sophie’s curse begins to fade.

Chihiro

Posted on by NieA_78

A little bit of cross-promotion… I draw as a hobby, and I just finished something I’m really proud of. This is a screenshot redraw of one of my favorite scenes in Spirited Away. Yes, I omitted the car.

When Chihiro gets creeped out by the statue in front of the abandoned theme park entrance, the look on her face is priceless, so I decided I needed to try and capture it in my own way.

Haru and the Baron

Posted on by NieA_78

The Cat Returns is a bit of a curiosity in the Ghibli catalogue. It’s probably the most lighthearted film in their library, the character designs don’t have that distinctive Ghibli “look”, and it’s the most “cartoonish”, for lack of a better term. But it’s still the kind of quality one expects from a Ghibli film.

I like to think of The Cat Returns as a story which Shizuku from Whisper of the Heart has written about the Baron. The two films are connected, after all. There is another returning character which I somehow overlooked until now as well: Muta, the big white cat. In Whisper of the Heart, Shizuku met him on the train, so it would make sense that he appears in her story as well. (Keeping in mind that The Cat Returns being a story Shizuku wrote is just my headcanon and not actual canon, as far as I know…)

And in Ghibli tradition, there is another likeable lead character in Haru. She’s a high school girl just trying to find out where she belongs, and her adventures in the Cat Kingdom, with some help from the Baron, help her to discover her path.

Below you’ll find some screenshots I took of some of my favorite scenes with Haru and the Baron and some of the other characters. Haru is a rather ordinary girl, but for me that only adds to her charm.