The Ghibli style, now generated by AI, fascinates as much as it questions: can we really reproduce the soul of such a human universe in a few lines of code?
Who among us has never dreamed of, if only for a moment, to float alongside the cat-bus or to fall asleep in the tall grass of a world designed by Hayao Miyazaki?
The Ghibli style has this rare power to transcend generations, to suspend time, to open in each of us a breach towards childhood and the marvelous. But today, this collective dream becomes controversial material.
For the past few days, thousands of images have been invading the networks, all more “ghibible” than each other. Generated by artificial intelligence from simple selfies or textual descriptions, these works take up the visual codes of the Japanese studio, with disturbing precision. The result is stunning. Almost too much.
Faced with this avalanche of artificial images with a taste of digital nostalgia, a question arises: what does these AI really imitate? A graphic style or a soul? An aesthetic or a philosophy?
Ghibli’s universal call: a style that speaks to our souls
In the movies of the studio Ghibli a magic in the movies that we never manage to name, but that we instantly recognize. An atmosphere suspended between dreams and reality, where forest spirits meet lonely children, where trains spin in the void, where silences are as important as words. At Ghibli, the marvelous never suddenly arises. It slowly infuses, like a gentle mist that mixes in everyday life.
The line is never too clear, the colors seem to have been softened by the memory, and the characters are deeply human, even when they do not have a human form. It is not a frozen graphic style, but an art of suggestion. Ghibli is not what we see, that’s what we feel. It is a sensory language, a delicate emotion, an invitation to slow down in a short world.
This evocation power has marked generations. We don’t “watch” a Ghibli film: we enter it, we get lost, we go back. And this is precisely what makes current fascination for the images generated by IA so disturbing. Because if everyone recognizes this style, very few understand its substance.
When artificial intelligence imitates the inexpressible
Social networks suddenly overflow with dreamlike illustrations recalling the world of Ghibli. Fluffy forests, creatures with large eyes, scenes hanging over time: everything is almost there.
This viral phenomenon, supplied in particular by the Openai tool integrated into Chatgpt, caused a craze such that the firm had to temporarily limit its use. “Ghiblization” has become trendy. Users from the whole world post their virtual double Totoro version, share their “imaginary films” in the Ghibli style, and rejoice in this instant magic, accessible without pencil, without brush, without storyboard.
But behind the waouh effect hides a much heavier question: can we really capture the unspeakable with a line of code? AI recognizes patterns, reproduces textures, mimics atmospheres. She feels nothing, does not invent, does not doubt. What it restores is not Ghibli. This is the image we have of Ghibli. A brilliant shell. Nostalgia reproduced in the chain.
Creation or extraction? The ethical vagueness of the style generated
If the images generated by artificial intelligence inspired by the Ghibli universe seduce with their rendering, they also disturb by their origin. Because to look good, these visuals are not the fruit of a free inspiration or an artist’s work, but rather of a statistical mechanism which aggregates, imitates and reformulates which has already been done – often without crediting the original creators.
The Ghibli style, as taken up by AI, was not born in a laboratory or in a database. It was built through decades of meticulous work, artistic explorations, deep aesthetic choice anchored in Japanese culture, in the philosophies of Zen, Shintoism, slowness and living. It is not a visual filter. It is a cultural, sensitive, inhabited work.
However, artificial intelligences have learned to “produce ghibli” by being fed by thousands of images from the web, without always knowing if these images were free of rights, nor who had drawn them. The databases used to train these AI are rarely transparent, and even less equitable. Artists find themselves sucked there, sometimes even in spite of themselves, in a gigantic algorithmic funnel where their style becomes a dependent raw material.
Can we therefore talk about creation? Or is it more of extraction-or even exploitation-of a collective visual heritage? What some see as a sincere tribute resembles, for others, to a form of parasitism: AI is used in human creations to generate, in a few seconds, images which will then be shared, valued, even monetized … without the original artists withdraw anything.
The problem is not only legal – because in the state, the style is not protected by copyright – but deeply moral. Who owns the beauty of a universe when it was built with patience, pain, and intuition? Is it acceptable that a generative model, without consciousness or intention, can simulate this aesthetic language as one applies an Instagram filter? And above all: what do we collect, collectively, when the memory of the gesture disappears behind visual performance?
This debate exceeds the only case of Ghibli. He questions our relationship to creation in a world where originality is measured at the speed of production, and where emotion is consumed in scrolling. Because if we accept that the style, the universe, the “paw” can be copied without recognition or respect, we validate the idea that everything that exists can be absorbed, digested, and reclaimed in the name of innovation.
Art has never been a case of pure imitation. And when technology forgets the meaning in favor of style, it only smooths out what was precisely rough, imperfect, alive.
Ghibli, the anti-IA par excellence
At a time when creation is becoming more and more assisted, predicted, automated, the Ghibli studio remains a precious anomaly. Hayao Miyazaki, a central figure of the studio, has always defended an artisanal vision of animated cinema. For him, each drawing is an act of life. Each plan must be born from a human, imperfect, slow, but sincere gesture. Nothing in his work is optimization. Everything breathes the effort, attention to detail, poetry of the moment.
During a documentary devoted to the studio creation process, Miyazaki was faced with a movement demonstration generated by an AI. His glacial gaze betrayed deep discomfort. What he saw was nothing human. There was no intention, no emotion, no gaze. He described this technology as “insult to life itself”. A brutal sentence, but which sums up all his philosophy: we do not create by automatism, we create to express a vision, a feeling, a memory of the world.
The Ghibli studio has never run after the effects of fashion or spectacular technical innovations. He has always placed the drawing, the line, and time in the heart of his work. This loyalty to a slow, lively and inhabited creation makes Ghibli a total opposite to the synthetic aesthetics of artificial intelligences. Where AI reproduces images without memory, Ghibli tells stories inhabited by forgetting, silence and disappearance.
In a world saturated with disposable productions, the studio still resists. Not by nostalgia or by refusal of modernity, but because it defends another idea of the beautiful. An idea that is not reduced to a style or a technical performance. An idea that escapes algorithm.
What this debate reveals from our time
The dazzling success of images “ghibized” by IA not only says something about the evolution of visual technologies. It also reveals, in hollow, the sensitive flaws of our time. This collective need to plunge back into sweet, soothing, familiar universes, betrays weariness in the face of the brutality of reality. Ghibli embodies an imaginary refuge, a salutary slowness at the time of the permanent flow.
By reproducing these images to the chain, the AIs only respond to a massive demand: that of finding a dream, but without waiting. Wonderful, without detour. An emotion, without risk. What humans take years to refine, build, transmit, algorithm restores it in a second, sanitized, but immediately shareable. This satisfies our most in a hurry, but questions our ability to accept complexity, expectations, imperfection.
The current cult of the perfect image, emotional immediacy and visual mimicry insidiously threatens the very meaning of the artistic gesture. By glorifying the performance of AI without thinking about what it erases, we participate in a form of symbolic collapse. It is not so much the technology itself that is in question, but the use made of it, and the indifference with which we erase the human origins.
The Ghibli case is not anecdotal. He embodies, in his own way, the shock between two worlds: that of memory, sensitive, fragile – and that of speed, calculation, proliferation. It is not a war. It is a fracture line, more and more visible.
For a responsible creation in the face of the illusions of automation
The apparent lightness of the images generated in Ghibli hides a heavier reality: that of energy resources mobilized massively to produce, continuously, ephemeral content. Each image generated is not trivial. It is based on energy -consuming, often invisible, but very real data centers, whose ecological imprint grows as enthusiasm for AI is growing.
This visual surge, if it moves, also questions our collective responsibility. Why generate thousands of “cute” visuals that imitate slowness, when we could precisely preserve this slowness in our creation processes? Why let the technological illusion crush which, in essence, should remain fragile, singular, human?
Art, as the Ghibli studio defends, is not reproducible. He lives in the margin, in imperfection, in the relationship with the living. Opposing this vision to the mechanical performance of AI is not a rejection of progress, but a call to think so otherwise.
It becomes essential to lay the foundations for a more responsible digital creation: ethics in its conception, respectful in its use, aware in its rhythm. Because imitating, accelerating, producing endlessness is not without consequences. Neither for artists, nor for cultures, nor for the planet.
Restoring our relationship to creation in the AI era is choosing what we want to preserve: the memory of a line, the correctness of an intention, the value of a look.
