Miyazaki Mania

A chat with Jake Cunningham of Ghibliotheque

In something of a rarity these days, I had a genuine moment of shock looking at this weekend’s box office numbers. At the top of the rankings was Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in 10 years, The Boy and the Heron.

The director’s films, along with those of his production house Studio Ghibli, have certainly been building a larger following stateside. (They’ve all been streaming, for the most part, on Max since 2020.) Admittedly, Miyazaki is a bit of a shameful blind spot for me. If you need a Ghibli 101, I would recommend this post from

Max Covill

over on

It's the Pictures

from this week:

A Beginner's Guide to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli

But maybe you’re like me and have seen My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away, the film for which Miyazaki won an Academy Award, and need a little help navigating where to go next. Luckily, I was able to have a wonderful conversation with my pal Jake Cunningham of the Ghibliotheque podcast this week to help explain what I’m missing in the wide world of Ghibli films. If you’re a relatively green viewer like me, this is very much a conversation for you! (They’ve already got a spoiler-free episode up on the film, too.)

PSST: for any holiday shoppers with a cinephile young or old in your life: Jake and his co-host Michael Leader have written several books about movies, including a recently released Ghibli guide for young film fans.

You started as a novice watcher of Ghibli — beyond having an expert in your co-host Michael Leader, what helped you unlock these movies?

I think it's not necessarily just having an expert with me there to help me through them. It's talking about them, not just with him but with others who have this great connection to them. What we've found over the years during the podcast — and when we do events and talk to people after the events — is the different things that these films mean to people. We built a show based on my reading of them, but it's in the other readings that you get entrenched deeper into it. Whether that is a personal connection based on the screening or first viewing, or what thematically or narratively the film is doing, it's more through that wider Ghibli community that I've become deeper into it.

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Once you've watched the films, you run out pretty quickly. I mean, there's 25 now, and you've got to go out and find more. You delve deeper, whether that is reading the Nausicaä manga or checking out music videos from the '90s, you start going deeper and deeper. Then you've fallen down this rabbit hole that's impossible to get out of, but in a way, it's a very lovely rabbit hole to have ended up in.