Ghibli’s Worlds of Women: From Women’s Films to the Women Who Shaped the Permanent Studio Ghibli

Abstract

Studio Ghibli has created some of anime’s most memorable female characters. In doing so, Ghibli has developed an association with feminism. This chapter asks what is actually feminist about the way Studio Ghibli makes films in order to reassess the studio’s relationship to its female audiences and female workforce. Taking the production of a trilogy of “women’s films”—Kiki’s Delivery Service, Only Yesterday and, perhaps more surprisingly, Porco Rosso, as its temporal focus, this chapter examines the roles of women behind the screen at Studio Ghibli. Focusing on the stories told by female staff members at this time, the chapter seeks to make women’s contributions to Studio Ghibli more visible within a context of great change as the studio was reimagined as a permanent entity in the early 1990s.