Studio Ghibli’s Deepest Secret Is What Comes Next

Goro Miyazaki’s first feature prompted his father, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, to leave a premier screening for a smoke. At 85, the elder Miyazaki still works daily at Studio Ghibli, the singular storytelling operation beloved for its hand-drawn animations and explorations of environmentalism and family dynamics, in films such as My Neighbor Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle. Whether Goro may succeed his father as Studio Ghibli’s leader is a central question of Sohee Kim and Felix Gillette’s feature, but it’s not the only one; Ghibli, now a subsidiary of a Japanese TV network, has long avoided the easy profits of sequels and held artistic vision at the center of its business. “To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery,” Kim and Gillette write. Their story is a quiet, fascinating succession drama, rich with vulnerable characters and concerned with an old question: How can art best sustain itself?

It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.

The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”