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PORTSIDE CULTURE

STUDIO GHIBLI FACES ITS BIGGEST VILLAIN YET: AN IRONIC ONSLAUGHT OF
AI  
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Jacob Oller
March 27, 2025
AV Club
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_ Hayao Miyazaki's environmentalist masterpiece Princess Mononoke
returns to theaters while his style is stolen by AI. _

, Photo: GKIDS

 

Studio Ghibli gave its villains too much credit. So often in its
heartfelt anime films, foes are just misunderstood. They’re one
deeply felt conversation away from reckoning with their own misguided
actions, beaten with kindness rather than force. In the real world,
the enemies of art and nature don’t have complex backstories or
noble intentions that got out of hand. The bad guys steal and burn on
a whim, driven only by entitlement. This week, irony layers upon irony
as the thieving tech bros behind OpenAI have released a ChatGPT update
particularly good at mimicking the style of Studio Ghibli, just as the
anime house’s cautionary epic about technological overreach returns
to theaters. 

In celebration of the studio’s 40th anniversary, a new 4K
restoration of _Princess Mononoke _screens in IMAX theaters
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the country, all while unscrupulous nerds steal from the masters who
created it—and burn up an extreme amount of resources
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do so. At least the environmentalist fantasy imagined a foe whose
destructive industrialization was driven by need
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Lady Eboshi, the antagonist of _Princess Mononoke_, ravages the
forest and disrupts the natural order of things, but only because her
desire to protect and nurture her community of societal rejects is so
strong. But those like OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who changed
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social media avatar to an AI version aping Ghibli’s house style,
spit in the face of Hayao Miyazaki, the man whose style they love,
just because they can. Terrible copies flood social media, made by a
machine completely antithetical to the creations it strives to
replicate.

It’s hard to imagine a divide with more clarity; in _NHK Special:
Hayao Miyazaki—The One Who Never Ends_, Miyazaki says, in a quote
that has nearly gone as viral as the AI images plagiarizing him, that
“I would never wish to incorporate [AI] into my work at all. I
strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

Adding injury to that insult is the broad infringement of copyrights
that this generative AI must partake in to achieve this result. OpenAI
is being sued left and right, by individual artists and publications
alike, all to “give users as much creative freedom as possible,”
according to a statement
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to _404 Media_. And yet, the crass and lifeless copying of a house
style is about as creatively limiting as anything imaginable. At least
those _How To Draw Anime Characters_ books, where one learns by
reproducing established styles and characters, encourage artists to
build the skills necessary to actually make something of their own.
Only offering up bad forgeries, generative AI becomes the refuge of
the selfish, the lazy, the imaginatively empty.

Because Lady Eboshi is driven by passion and protectiveness,
wrongheaded as it may be, in _Princess Mononoke_, she is capable of
change. She is not killed or even soundly defeated by the film’s
heroes. Instead, she is confronted by the consequences of her
extremism, and learns to embrace balance. Even in Ghibli films less
on-the-nose to this situation, like _Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The
Wind_, humanity gets the benefit of the doubt because there’s
something relatable to the fear driving their actions. After
destroying the world with apocalyptic weaponry, what remains of
mankind eventually listens to reason instead of dooming themselves
again through violent ignorance. In Miyazaki’s eco-fables, a kernel
of hope exists even when considering those who have killed their own
planet, because they had emotional reasons for their actions.
Understanding those emotions allows Ghibli’s heroes to meet the
villains on their level, to let faith grow from the shared anxieties
that underlie their humanity.

But this mindset requires antagonists driven by emotion, rather than
the lack of emotion. _Princess Mononoke_ explores the destruction of
nature by humanity and its machines through the lens of need. ChatGPT
and its flood of Ghibli-flavored slop appeal only to half-hearted
wants. In both cases, there’s greed and exploitation. But only in
one is there the possibility to learn from mistakes. 

In the documentary _The One Who Never Ends_, Miyazaki continues his
thoughts on AI art with statements nearly as apocalyptic as those
in _Nausicaä_. “I feel like we are nearing to the end of the
times,” he says. “We humans are losing faith in ourselves.” No
longer seeing art as work, as something worth putting effort into, a
vast audience now has no faith that it can create anything of its own.
Instead, this audience is more than happy to shove the movies it
loves—movies currently returning to the big screen as animation’s
gold standard—into the meat grinder, for no other reason than
because it’s easy to do so. If the villains in Ghibli movies were
that vacant, the films would never have become classics in the first
place.

* studio Ghibli
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* Miyazaki
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* artificial intelligence
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