I was a 90s kid with a television remote and a channel called Animax — and that was enough to change everything.
Animax was my first window into Japanese anime. I was completely captivated from the beginning, drawn into a world of animation I had never encountered before. Some of those shows remain my favourites to this day. One thing led to another, and eventually I discovered Studio Ghibli films. My very first was Kiki’s Delivery Service — and after that, I simply could not stop. I watched most of the Ghibli films, one after another, each one leaving something behind.
What makes Studio Ghibli so special? It is difficult to answer briefly because the list is genuinely endless. It is their visual style — soft, luminous, unmistakably their own. It is their stories — heartwarming and quietly thought-provoking. It is the way they blend magic and realism so seamlessly that the enchanted world they create feels entirely believable. It is how they explore emotions, family, friendship, and our relationship with the natural world — with such gentleness and such depth. These films remind us that there is magic within each of us, and that caring for the world around us is not weakness but wisdom.
The hand-drawn animation is a stupendous achievement in itself. Every frame drawn by hand. Every blade of grass, every shifting cloud, every expression on a character’s face — deliberate, considered, laboured over. To understand what that means is to understand why the recent AI Ghibli trend felt so jarring to me.
In March 2025, people across the world began transforming their photographs into Ghibli-style images using ChatGPT. It went viral almost instantly — hundreds of millions of images generated in days. Everyone was doing it. It looked beautiful, in the way that a very good imitation can look beautiful.
But something about it troubled me deeply.
To take a photograph, run it through an algorithm, and call the result “Ghibli art” feels like an injustice to the artist. AI cannot account for the effort that goes into each frame. It cannot account for the pain, the patience, the decades of devotion. It cannot account for the emotions that a human artist pours into each deliberate stroke. What it produces is a surface — stylistically familiar, but hollowed out of everything that made the original meaningful.
This made me think of other artists who defined their eras through their unique vision. What will happen to the legacies of painters like Raja Ravi Varma or Leonardo da Vinci — artists celebrated not just for what they created, but for how and why they created it? Will AI begin producing versions of their works too, stripped of context, of struggle, of soul? Artists are honoured for their irreplaceable humanity — for the immense dedication they poured into their craft over a lifetime. That is not something a prompt can replicate.
It is not given to everyone to be an artist. Those who are — truly are — bring something to the world that cannot be manufactured. As a devoted fan of Studio Ghibli, I believe in honouring Hayao Miyazaki for his passion, his patience, and the masterpieces he has given us over a lifetime of work. The way to honour an artist is to experience their art as it was originally created — not to feed it into a machine and generate something that wears it like a costume.
And so I chose not to follow this trend.
Sayōnara.