What The Ghibli Trend Tells Us About Ourselves
From Hayao Miyazaki's moving cinema to a generic photo filter, the Ghibli trend is a reflection of human nature.
A still from the movie, Grave Of The Fireflies (1988).
I remember the time I watched Studio Ghibli’s famous movies, Grave of the Fireflies and Kiki’s Delivery Service almost a decade ago. And I remember being caught off-guard by their emotional depth and deftness. I’m no cinephile and knew little about anime (and still do not know much about it). But when you watch a Ghibli movie, you know you’re witnessing something profound and even extraordinary.
Grave Of The Fireflies is an account of the Second World War atrocities for local Japanese people. At the heart of the narrative are orphaned siblings, Seita and Setsuko, who flee their home following an air raid. The movie follows their travails as they look for food and eventually die of malnutrition. While the visuals are soft on eyes, the implications of the scene are extremely hard on the heart. Most adults think of anime as “kiddie stuff”, the movie is actually quite a difficult watch for it does not redeem the suffering of the children in any way whatsoever. War is not just bad, it is an endless horror which leaves too many graves behind— is the message of the movie.
On the other hand, Kiki’s Delivery Service is an easier watch but still loaded with tough life-lessons. Kiki is young witch and she has to leave her home to become her own person. She eventually establishes a small delivery service business for herself and the movie centres around her experiences with that. She succeeds but also faces challenges. She exhibits a blend of easiness and maturity that characterise a young adult.
Studio Ghibli was founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki, and Isao Takahata. A video where he shares his views about graphics created with artificial intelligence routinely goes viral on social media but it is worth looking at it again here.
Calling the AI art an “insult to life”, Miyazaki shares an anecdote about a disabled friend and how his suffering affects him as person. The director says,
“Every morning, I see my friend who has a disability. It’s so hard for him to just do a high-five…his arm with stiff muscle reaching out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is or whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology in my work at all. I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.”
The designers who made the presentation listen on speechless and when asked about their goal, they say that they want to create a machine that can create pictures like humans do. Perhaps, Sam Altman and OpenAI saw the video at some point and took it as a challenge too. Miyazaki is now 84 years old and has probably (hopefully) not heard of the viral Ghibli AI art trend.
Yet, what really is going on here? What was Miyazaki’s perspective all about and why did the Internet fall for those cutesy Ghibli images, only to move on from it after a week? What does all of this tell us about human nature?
Well, for one, the artist is the one who sees suffering and reflects it back to the society in a way that it can confront it. As the world stands on cusp of more war-like disturbances, movies such as Grave Of The Fireflies show us the real cost of war for an average person. Ofcourse, suffering comes in many forms which is why Miyazaki uses the example of a disabled friend rather than war to explain his aversion to AI art. But point is that Miyazaki’s style has immense softness precisely because the stories he told were too hard to swallow.
What this means is that we need more beauty in response to suffering. We don’t just need to see that beauty but we need to be able to create it for ourselves. For an artist, that might be in terms of a visual or performance art but for most of us, it could be anything— our thoughts, actions, nature, food, laughter and joy, consideration, understanding, and so much more. The important part is that there must be something that has no agenda other than providing an anti-dote to the suffering that we have witnessed.
Setsuko dies while clutching at a piece of watermelon.
Yet, the world we now live in is the exact opposite of that. Most of us are unable to create beauty today and would rather accept junk versions of it— be it Instagram filters or ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli filter. It’s much easier to do that to beautify our photos for a screen wallpaper or a profile photo. We do not realise that our inability to create beauty is due to our unwillingness to confront suffering around us and within us. Beauty cannot be superficial because if it was, then this scene of a kid dying of hunger (and probably sadness) would not feel so profound.
It is not the wars or any of the generic issues of the world that we need to dwell upon but our own lives. The deepest existential crisis of artificial intelligence is precisely this— it is taking us further and further away from ourselves. It might feel gratifying for a moment but it doesn’t eliminate our suffering in any way. It only repurposes it in some other form, often emotionally and mentally. And then we set out again to seek a newer, more glossier form of beauty.
It is human nature to turn away from suffering and seek beauty. Our technologies today make that much easier than ever before. Yet, there always comes a time when we must confront our difficulties in order to create beauty for ourselves. Because only that can make live worth living, no matter how many cutesy Ghibli images one creates.