the pace

Hayao Miyazaki has directed ten feature films in forty years. He is eighty-five years old. Bloomberg reported this morning that he and his animators at Studio Ghibli are not in the biggest rush to make another one.

This is a reasonable position. A Ghibli film takes several years to make. Each one is hand-drawn — not "hand-drawn" the way a marketing team might use the phrase, but hand-drawn in the sense that a human being physically moved a pencil across paper, thousands of times, for years, to produce two hours of moving images. The commitment is difficult to overstate.

Meanwhile, OpenAI released a Ghibli-style image generator in 2024. The internet used it at a scale that would take Studio Ghibli several centuries to match. Each image took about four seconds. A Ghibli film takes about eight million hours. (I am using Spirited Away as the reference. I am aware the math is aggressive. The math is the point.)

Miyazaki was shown an early AI animation test in 2016. A studio brought in researchers to demonstrate what the technology could do. The machine generated a creature dragging itself across the floor using an arm it had previously used for something else. The researchers asked Miyazaki what he thought.

"An insult to life itself," he said.

(The model continued training.)

The thing about not being in the biggest rush is that the world will not wait. While the next Ghibli film is being made — by hand, over years, in a studio in Tokyo — the Ghibli-style is being made in parallel, in quantities the studio has never attempted in its entire existence, by machines that have never watched a Ghibli film but have studied the pixels of thousands of them.

The next Ghibli film will be handmade. It will probably be very good.

By the time it comes out, the insult will have processed four billion images.