What Ghibli films and Ghibli memes share
The Wind Rises (2013)
The four seconds of film above is the result of fifteen months of painstaking animation by a single artist under Hayao Miyazaki’s watchful eye.
And this image, created in the same style, was likely made in less than a minute.
Created by Grant Slatton and GPT-4o
This image was followed by untold thousands of memes emulating the same illustrated look, and even a full trailer for the 2001 version of The Lord of the Rings.
Studio Ghibli and its resident visionary Hayao Miyazaki are the originators of this style. Their masterpieces include films like My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away.
The Ghibli memes that were suddenly everywhere were produced by OpenAI’s highly impressive GPT–4o image generation (which I will have much more to say about next week).
As social media overflowed with AI-generated images mimicking Ghibli’s distinctive aesthetic, we witnessed a fascinating and historic collision between one of animation’s most labor-intensive traditions and the instant gratification of AI art.
And yet, the difference between the Ghibli films and the Ghibli memes is not so much about methods as it is about effort and commitment.
To be clear, Hayao Miyazaki is a genius and the Ghibli meme makers are not. But they still share something deeply meaningful, not just superficially, but creatively.
Craft vs Click
When it comes to effort, there is a vast chasm separating Ghibli films from Ghibli memes.
The Ghibli memes are made quickly and easily. Even the LoR trailer only took nine hours.
Studio Ghibli’s films are lovingly and laboriously hand-crafted over three to five years.
But as I covered in Everything is a Remix, meme-making is creative. It’s just the very first steps on a very long and demanding path.
The meme makers did something simple but powerful: they copied, transformed, and combined existing work to create something new.
Grant Slatton, who created the family portrait above and sparked this craze, just loved Ghibli films and wanted to see his family transformed into Ghibli characters.
Later meme makers were more interested in combining the Ghibli style with other works, primarily memes. What would the gentle nostalgic style of Ghibli look like applied to the devil-ish Disaster Girl meme?
The Ghibli memes came from regular people who took a moment from their day to have fun, and incidentally, they did something creative.
The meme Disaster Girl converted to Ghibli style
The Long, Long, Very Very Long Road
Hayao Miyazaki had a similar moment of incidental creativity untold decades ago. He did some rudimentary creative act while he was playing. But then he kept going. And going. And going.
Over time, these acts became bold and sophisticated. He merged the aesthetics of ukiyo-e woodblock prints into this work. The result can be seen in My Neighbor Totoro. He merged Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz with Japanese folklore. The result was Spirited Away.
What distinguishes Miyazaki is not so much how he created but how far he was willing to travel down the long, winding path of creativity until he finally started creating enduring art.
The rest of us may never get there, but we can travel at our own pace, go as far as we like, have fun along the way, and maybe even make enduring creative work for ourselves or our communities.
A woodblock print by Kawase Hasui. This style was one of the foremost influences on Hayao Miyazaki.