"Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same."
- Hayao Miyazaki
Pastel magic. Everyone smiled a little more today as we briefly chose to see the world through Ghibli-colored glasses.
It’s the moment in every Studio Ghibli film when the mundane turns luminous—sunlight dappling across an old wooden floor, a breeze dancing through a curtain, steam curling upwards from a simple meal, the world is alive. That’s how the internet feels today.
A brief collective agreement that we’d rather see life through the warm, textured lens of Hayao Miyazaki’s world, just for today.
But why now? Why, in 2025, has ghibli-fication captured attention?
The internet needs softness
The pace has been frenetic: high-speed doomscrolling, algorithmic chaos, and an attention economy that rewards the loudest voices.
Ghibli, in contrast, is an antidote: a gentle rebellion, if you will.
It invites us to slow down and savor, to see beauty in the everyday. It’s not nostalgia for childhood, necessarily, but nostalgia for presence; for a time when we noticed how interesting and beautiful some raindrops against a window sill could be.
And suddenly, we realize people care more about painting reality in soft watercolor than debating hyperscaler capex and training vs. inference. It is magic, not analysis.
But beyond nostalgia or cinematic reverence, there’s something deeper at play: the power of visualization and simplification.
Ghibli’s aesthetic distills the clutter and commotion of modernity into ordinary beauty. Its magic is not in grand spectacle but in quietness. By re-rendering current events, memes, events, and family photos with such clarity, Ghibli reminds us that reality, too, can be seen this way. If only we choose to look.
“We live in a world that is full of joy, beauty, and adventure. But there is no way to experience it unless you’re truly alive.”
- Hayao Miyazaki
The ability to see life in poetic frames is itself an act of happiness. The Ghibli effect that we see all over the internet today is proof that joy is not always in novelty but in re-seeing what has been there all along. A sunbeam, a train station, a forgotten cup of coffee.
There’s also a deeper, perhaps unspoken, longing underneath it all. Maybe everything is Ghibli because we want it to be. Maybe we’re trying to remind ourselves that the fleeting is worth noticing and smiling at.
Worth a thousand words
Animation, at its core, is a celebration of the imagination’s freedom. In a reality of constraints, animation is bounded only by the scope of creativity. It invites us to return to the pure wonder that we once inhabited as children.
"I think the purpose of animation is to help children and adults understand something in themselves that they can’t articulate with words."
- Hayao Miyazaki
The childlike joy that a Ghibli film evokes can’t be recreated in words. Adult words are an incomplete vessel for expressing the purity of childhood: uncomplicated, untainted, unfiltered.
Childhood is a time when the lines between the real and imagined blur, where every stick becomes a sword, and every cloud, a castle. Animation preserves that playfulness. In every animated frame, there’s a trace of that boundless energy.
We were this way instinctively as children, unconstrained by what we did not know. Animation allows us, as adults, to re-enter that time when everything was pastel magic, everything was Ghibli.
so good!!! the beauty is in the now. thank you for the reminder eddie! <3
Brb watching princess mononoke for the 10th time