Notable Figures

The director most people think of when they hear the name Ghibli. He started as an in-between animator at Toei in 1963 and has directed twelve features, drawing an obsession with flight, strong young heroines and the natural world into almost all of them. He has announced his retirement more than once, and came back every time.

Five years older than Miyazaki, and the one who taught him that animation could be serious. A reader of French poetry who took years to finish each film, he never repeated a visual style: realism in Grave of the Fireflies, comic strip in the Yamadas, charcoal sketches in Kaguya. He also produced Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky.

An editor at Animage magazine who wouldn't take no for an answer from either director, and ended up becoming the producer who kept the studio alive. He found ways to finance films nobody wanted to fund, sold Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies as a double feature, and ran the studio as president after it became independent.

The founder of the publisher Tokuma Shoten, a businessman with a gambler's instinct who also ran the film studio Daiei. He trusted Suzuki, and Suzuki trusted Miyazaki and Takahata: his money made the Nausicaä film possible and, a year later, a studio. He stayed behind Ghibli as executive producer until his death.

For many at the studio, the natural successor. He was the character designer of Takahata's Anne of Green Gables, animation director of Grave of the Fireflies and Only Yesterday, and directed Whisper of the Heart in 1995. He died in 1998, at 47, and it remains his only film as director.

She met Takahata and Miyazaki at Toei and chose the colors of their films for more than three decades, from Nausicaä to The Wind Rises. The soft greens of Totoro and the glowing night of Spirited Away's bathhouse passed through her hands.

The painter behind the forests people remember. As art director of My Neighbor Totoro he gave the Japanese countryside its most famous portrait, and he went on to lead the backgrounds of Only Yesterday, Pom Poko and Princess Mononoke.

Hayao's son trained as a landscape designer and first came to the studio to run the Ghibli Museum. He then directed Tales from Earthsea, against his father's wishes, followed by From Up on Poppy Hill and Earwig and the Witch, and led the creation of Ghibli Park.

An animator who grew up inside the studio and directed Arrietty and When Marnie Was There. When Ghibli paused production in 2014, he left with producer Yoshiaki Nishimura to help found Studio Ponoc.

One of Toei's first animators and the teacher of both founders. A lover of jeeps and anything with an engine, he was animation director of Takahata's first feature and of Miyazaki's, and spent his later years training new animators.

His film The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep showed a young Takahata that animation could be poetic and political at once. Decades later, Ghibli helped bring the finished version, The King and the Mockingbird, to Japanese theaters.

He met Miyazaki on Nausicaä and has scored every one of his features since, as well as Takahata's Kaguya. It is hard to think of Totoro, Mononoke or Spirited Away without hearing his music.

A friend of Miyazaki since the early eighties and one of the loudest defenders of Ghibli in the United States. He oversaw the English version of Spirited Away, the film that introduced the studio to many Western audiences.

As a young animator he drew the God Warrior scene in Nausicaä, and went on to create Neon Genesis Evangelion. Miyazaki later cast him as the voice of Jiro, the engineer at the center of The Wind Rises.

A Dutch animator whose Oscar-winning short Father and Daughter caught the studio's attention. Ghibli invited him to make his first feature with them, The Red Turtle, a film without a single line of dialogue.

The British author of the novel that became Howl's Moving Castle. Her last book, Earwig and the Witch, became the studio's first fully 3D film, directed by Goro Miyazaki.