Studio Ghibli

Background

The three founders already had long careers in Japanese film and television animation. They had worked together on The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun in 1968 and on the two Panda! Go, Panda! films of 1972 and 1973. Suzuki came from the publisher Tokuma Shoten, where he had been an editor at its anime magazine Animage, and Tokuma Shoten backed the new company.

The founders wanted to shake up a Japanese animation industry they saw as stagnant by making original feature films of high quality. Speaking at the Annecy animation festival in 1995, Suzuki explained that every film was meant to get the team's full energy, with enough money and time behind it. Miyazaki chose the name himself, out of his love of aircraft. Ghibli is an Italian word for a hot wind off the Sahara and was also the nickname of the Caproni Ca.309, an Italian scouting plane, and he hoped the studio would blow a new wind through the anime business.

Miyazaki went on to direct most of the studio's films, with Takahata the second most prolific director, best known for Grave of the Fireflies. Ghibli stayed tied to Tokuma Shoten until April 2005, when it was spun off as an independent company.