The Ghibli style is an artistic style designed for making cartoons and today photographs created or modified in Ghibli style are very popular on the web. Created by the Japanese Studio Ghibli, founded in 1985, which is one of the most well-known animation studios in the world and has created highly successful films, even winning two Oscars, it was called “ghibli” in homage to the Caproni Ca.309 “Ghibli” aircraft, built from 1937 to the years of the Second World War by the Caproni company for the Italian military air force. The term ghibli comes from Arabic and indicates a hot desert wind, the same one that gives its name to the aircraft. Hayao Miyazaki, a great aviation enthusiast, chose this name to evoke the idea of a new wind blowing in the world of animation, just like the “ghibli” crossing the Sahara.
What is Ghibli style and why is it so popular
The Ghibli style is a type of aesthetic for animated films, used mainly to create or modify images. It creates a cartoon effect and is characterized by the use of warm, soft colors and “soft” and rounded lines, from which a magical and highly evocative atmosphere derives. Human figures are typically depicted with a sweet appearance and large eyes.
The style owes its name to Studio Ghibli, a studio that creates animated films founded in Tokyo in 1985 by some animators, including Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, who has created some of the most viewed films of Japanese cinema, including masterpieces such as The enchanted city, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki – Home deliveries And Princess Mononoke. Two of the Studio’s films were awarded the Oscar for best animated film: The enchanted city in 2003 and The boy and the heron in 2024. Other films made by the Studio have earned Academy Award nominations or received other prestigious film awards.
Studio Ghibli “invented” the style that bears its name since the 1980s. The popularity of the style, however, has increased in recent years because it is used by artificial intelligence software, which can create or transform photographs. In particular, the latest version of ChatGPT creates Ghibli-style images: a real trend has arisen from this and social networks are now full of images created or modified with the aesthetics of the Japanese studio: memes, images of famous people, landscapes, personal photos transformed by users. Even some politicians have used Ghibli-style images on their official profiles.
Origins and meaning of the name of Miyazaki’s studio: how to pronounce it
The name of Studio Ghibli derives from an Italian military aircraft produced during fascism by the Caproni company: the twin-engine Caproni Ca.309, which served as a reconnaissance aircraft, liaison aircraft and, occasionally, as a light bomber. The plane, which entered service in 1937, was designed for use in the Libyan desert and was therefore called “ghibli”, which in Arabic is the name for the hot wind from the Sahara. Produced in 247 examples, the Caproni Ca.309 “Ghibli” was used in the North African theater during the Second World War and was withdrawn from service after the end of hostilities.
What does an Italian plane have to do with an aesthetic for animated films created in Japan fifty years later? It has something to do with it because one of the founders of the studio, Hayao Miyazaki, is a fan of military aeronautics and, in particular, of Italian warplanes, and therefore in 1985 he chose to name the studio after the aircraft (in turn derived, as we have seen, from the name of the desert wind). Miyazaki, moreover, paid homage to the Italian aeronautics in other ways too, for example by inserting the character of Gianni Caproni, founder of the company that bears his name, in the film The wind picks up of 2013, and giving the name Ghibli to the seaplane in the film Porco Rosso of 1992. Pay attention, however, to the pronunciation: in Japanese the word ghibli is not read with a hard g, as we do, but with a soft g: therefore “gibli” and not “ghibli” as we read in Italy.
