Studio Ghibli
Why Studio Ghibli Refuses to Let Evil Win — or Lose
Hayao Miyazaki once told a colleague that he cannot make a film with a villain, because he understands villain too well.
The Idea
Most storytelling traditions are built around opposition — a protagonist, an antagonist, a resolution where one defeats the other. Studio Ghibli, and Miyazaki in particular, operates from a fundamentally different moral architecture. In his films, destruction comes not from evil characters but from systems, misunderstandings, and the particular human blindness that arrives with fear or grief. Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke is clearing a forest to smelt iron and free lepers from social exile. The sludge god choking the river in Spirited Away is a spirit so polluted by human waste he no longer recognises himself. Even Howl, vain and avoidant, is not a villain — he is someone who has simply given up on himself. This refusal to draw a clean moral line is not moral relativism. Miyazaki has strong convictions about industrialisation, war, and environmental destruction. But he insists that the people causing harm are rarely monstrous. They are embedded in conditions that make harm feel reasonable, even necessary. The result is something unusual in animated film — a persistent, almost aching ambivalence. You are never invited to boo. You are invited to understand. That shift, from judgment to comprehension, is quiet but radical. It changes what the story is asking you to do.
In the World
Princess Mononoke, released in 1997, is the sharpest demonstration of this principle under pressure. The film centres on a conflict between Irontown — a human settlement built by outcasts, run by a woman — and the ancient gods of the surrounding forest. The easy version of this story would pit industry against nature, with nature as the obvious hero. Miyazaki refuses it entirely. Lady Eboshi is one of the most compassionate figures in the film. She has bought the contracts of women sold into prostitution and given them skilled work and dignity. She has taken in lepers and given them a community. Her iron works are also destroying a forest and its gods. San, the girl raised by wolves who fights for the forest, is ferocious and principled and sometimes cruel. Neither is the protagonist's ally in any clean sense. The young man caught between them, Ashitaka, is not trying to defeat anyone — he is trying to see clearly, which the film treats as the hardest and most valuable thing a person can do. When the film was released in North America, Miramax reportedly asked for cuts to simplify the moral landscape. Miyazaki's response, delivered via his producer, was a samurai sword and a note that read: 'No cuts.' The film was released intact.
Why It Matters
There is something genuinely counter-cultural about Miyazaki's moral framework — not because complexity is rare in literature, but because it is rare in the visual storytelling most of us absorb from childhood. The habit of sorting characters into heroes and villains is not just a narrative convenience; it becomes a cognitive habit. We carry it into how we read institutions, political opponents, even people who have hurt us. Someone must be the bad guy, or the story does not make sense. Ghibli quietly trains a different reflex. If you have grown up with these films, you have spent hours inside stories that ask you to hold contradictions without resolving them — to care about a character's suffering and still understand what they are destroying. That is not a small thing. It is closer to how actual moral life works: rarely a villain to defeat, more often a web of interests and histories and limited perspectives, all of them partially legitimate. Spending time with stories structured this way does not make you indecisive. It makes you slower to condemn, which is different from being slower to act.
A Question to Ponder
Is there a conflict in your own life — with a person, an institution, or a situation — where you have been playing one character as the villain, and what would actually change if you stopped?
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