Hayao Miyazaki Movies, Ranked from Worst to Best

12. “Ponyo” (2008)

You could make the argument that “Ponyo” is Miyazaki’s lightest movie (despite its harrowingly realistic depiction of a tsunami swallowing the Japanese seaboard), and/or that it’s the most child-friendly thing he ever made (a frantic and eye-popping eco-fable that liberally borrows from Hans Christian Andersen, it’s as inviting to toddlers as “My Neighbor Totoro” is to five-year-olds), but it would be a mistake to dismiss this watery fantasia as just “one for the kids” — and not only because the one time Miyazaki literally tried to make a movie for 10-year-old girls he wound up with “Spirited Away.” 

Yes, “Ponyo” is about a big-eyed fish girl who escapes to the surface and develops a ham addiction so intense that it threatens to destabilize our entire planet, but the maximalist simplicity of Miyazaki’s pencil-thin story allows the movie’s operatic undertow to form into a tidal wave. From the script’s Wagnerian character names to Joe Hisaishi’s burletta-inspired score and the various “Fantasia”-like underwater sequences that Miyazaki draws with a degree of love and invention that he usually reserves for the skies, “Ponyo” is animated Zauberoper that feels like it has as much in common with Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” or Janácek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” as it does any of its director’s other movies. 

It also helps that Ponyo’s bond with our human pal Sōsuke is one of the most accurately relentless depictions of five-year-old friendship ever committed to film (parents know), and that the sheer vibrancy of the animation is still unrivaled by any of Studio Ghibli’s other work. Sure, “Ponyo” may lack the emotional complexity of Miyazaki’s greater masterpieces, but none of those movies end with a Noah Cyrus/Frankie Jonas duet. “You can’t be human and magic at the same time,” little Ponyo is told. Even in its most effervescent forms, Miyazaki’s work begs to differ. —DE

11. “Howl’s Moving Castle” (2004)

Most famous for providing the Ghibli universe with its hottest hunk in the beefy, long-haired title character, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is Miyazaki’s least magical adventure. But it’s still pretty darn magical. Very loosely based on a British novel from 1986, the film is set in the lovingly rendered steampunk world of Ingary, and follows sweet but insecure young hatter Sophie, who is cursed by a witch to be 90 years old. Looking for a way to break the curse, she ends up working as a cleaning lady for Howl in his castle, as the wizard seeks to end a raging war dividing the land.

Miyazaki conceived of the film as a response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the anti-war message is a bit more hamfisted and blunt than his films usually get. In general, the story is more of a fairy tale than any of Miyazaki’s other works, with all the resulting lack of depth you may expect. But the design of the titular castle is still stunning, the scope is still epic, the anti-war message still rouses, and the central romance between Sophie and Howl still tugs at your heart. —WC

10. “The Castle of Cagliostro” (1979)

Miyazaki is most famous for making personal, original, idiosyncratic films about his favored themes: nature, environmentalism, pacifism, feminism, youth, and aging. But for his feature debut, when Ghibli was just a glimmer in his eye, he made pure franchise popcorn entertainment. And the result is a complete blast. “The Castle of Cagliostro” is a stand-alone entry in the “Lupin III” series, an iconic manga and anime franchise about the descendant of legendary gentleman thief Arsene Lupin, as he travels the world with his criminal gang taking on heists and outfoxing the determined Interpol agent Zenigata.

In “Castle of Cagliostro,” his heist isn’t to steal money or gold, but a person: Princess Clarisse, who is being forced to marry the titular Cagliostro, a monstrous greedy count. It’s a perfect setup for some fun, and “Castle of Cagliostro” is fun above all else, a total action-adventure blast with setpieces like the car chase and the often-imitated clock-tower fight that rank among the most thrilling moments in the anime film canon. Miyazaki’s confidence and skill as director from the jump is a sight to behold. —WC

9. “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989)

Your flying broom mileage may vary with “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” but it is perhaps the most picturesque version of a story Studio Ghibli likes to tell: that first brush with independence where a characters needs to find the well of determination within themselves to assert the person they want to be in the world. Or, in Kiki’s (Minami Takayama) case, the witch that she wants to be. The film’s beauty is ever-present visually, of course, in the gorgeous watercolor seaside town that Kiki settles into for a year as a witch-in-training, as well as in the main themes by Joe Hisaishi. “A Town with an Ocean View” has a delicacy, tenderness, and precociousness that mirrors Kiki as she figures out the boring adult stuff like finding where to live that tends to drag us all down to Earth.

What’s so rare and wonderful about Miyazaki’s work, generally, is that while his films often focus on children, the attitude of the movies themselves are never infantilized or childish (well, almost never, sorry “Ponyo”), never pitched down to the audience about things like Kiki’s crisis of confidence when her first “witch delivery services” don’t go to plan. There’s a very grown-up compassion that’s as palpable in this movie as the warm sunlight reflecting off the white stones of the buildings.

That isn’t something you may not always need, depending on whether you identify more with Kiki’s angst, Jiji the cat’s (Rei Sakuma) fixation with the cat next door, Tombo’s (Kappei Yamaguchi) obsession with flight, or Osono the baker’s (Keiko Toda) apprehension at motherhood. But it’s certainly nice that it’s there, whenever you need to see how Kiki’s well-earned optimism puts her in the way of exactly the people who will make her a better person. The joy of “Kiki’s Delivery Service” is the beautiful animation and score, of course, but also is in watching how a community keeps Kiki’s magic going when even she isn’t sure of its source. —SS

8. “Castle in the Sky” (1986)

A lot of people come to “Castle in the Sky” looking for the DNA of Miyazaki’s late ’90s and early ’00s masterpieces. And there are indeed some wild dieselpunk contraptions existing in contrast to the lush and timeless majesty of nature, a secret princess, magic that can save the world only unlockable through the power of love, unhinged elders and cute robot guys. In his second Studio Ghibli film, Miyazaki explores the same tension that guides “The Boy and the Heron” between the broken, over-exploited worlds that humans build and the magic ones (equally complicated) it is sometimes possible to reach.

But just looking at “Castle in the Sky” as an evolutionary step towards “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away” does this film a disservice. “Castle in the Sky” is an immaculately structured movie, from ragamuffin orphan Pazu (Mayumi Tanaka) finding the mysterious Sheeta (Keiko Yokozawa), who has a blue amulet both state and non-state actors are intent on seizing as the key to accessing Laputa, the titular castle in the sky. Miyazaki and the Studio Ghibli animation team alternate between the ordered villainy of Muska’s (Minori Terada) government forces and the gleeful chaos of Dola (Kotoe Hatsui) and her sky pirates (because of course there are sky pirates), ramping up the stakes for the two kids caught in the middle with each throw between Pazu and Sheeta.

Then, of course, there is Laputa, which should in no way live up to the runaway train of fantasy that Miyazaki has deployed throughout the film, but somehow it does. “The Castle in the Sky” is a swashbuckling adventure that can also stand to just sit in awe every now and then. It is that reverence — for imagination, for the spirit of humanity and the world — that makes “Castle in the Sky” and all Miyazaki movies shine brighter than any gem, magic or otherwise. —SS

7. “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” (1984)

Tell me about a complicated girl, Muse. It’s only us Classics sickos who will (or even should) view Miyazaki’s “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” as any kind of analog to Homer’s “Odyssey.” Miyazaki’s story, adapted from his own manga, is inventive enough as is. His heroine shares a curiosity and mischievousness with the mythic King of Ithaca, but the challenges she must overcome are as far from the whims of gods and goddesses as possible. There’s something in both the animation style and in the worldbuilding of “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” that’s wonderfully, unmistakably man-made, which is probably what makes the 1984 film fascinating, even almost 40 years later.

Nausicaä (Sumi Shimamoto) is a princess of her people about a 1,000 years after a (probably, definitely nuclear) calamity brought human civilization low. Survivors like her community, the titular Valley of the Wind, live in pockets not yet encroached upon by the toxic spores and dense jungles of alien flora and giant insectoid fauna that cover the Earth. This setting provides the perfect sandbox for Miyazaki’s imaginative powers. There’s a high fantasy mix of caravans and windmills and the stuff of fairytales combined with the exhilaration of flight — because obviously Nausicaä has a glider and the neighboring warrior Tolmekians have giant bomber-like planes — which Miyazaki treats as an art unto itself.

What really makes “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” is the secondary world Nausicaä explores, though. It is still one of Studio Ghibli’s (and yes, technically it predates the studio but only just) most fascinating depictions of nature as an undiscovered country: vibrant, mysterious, evolving, and yet also wounded by human interference. There’s no Ashitaka and San (Nausicaä is a little bit of both, really), but the Miyazaki film that made Studio Ghibli possible is still one of his most romantic, full of ruins of ages long past and awe for the way the world, and we, might remake ourselves. —SS

6. “Princess Mononoke” (1997)

Hayao Miyazaki’s environmental anxiety has been on full display since before Studio Ghibli was even born (1984’s “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” predated the animation powerhouse, even as it planted the seeds for Ghibli’s future), but it wasn’t until “Princess Mononoke” that he directly asked the question that percolates beneath all of his work: How do you live with dignity in an irredeemably cursed world? 

A sweeping adventure about a 14th century ironmonger, the animal gods who live in the forest she clearcuts to mine for ore, and the doomed warrior prince who risks what’s left of his life to stop the war between them, Miyazaki’s painstakingly lush mid-career masterpiece has long been seen as a cautionary tale about humanity’s disregard for nature, but its true power is rooted less in protest than in acceptance. Here is a “Star Wars”-sized epic about the moment when civilization deprived our world of an animistic purity that it will never get back; a historical fantasy saga that eschews the naivete of good and evil in favor of a more realistic story about a girl raised by giant wolves, ancient magic, and the catastrophic risk of living without sorrow for the beautiful things we’ve already lost. 

It’s no wonder that “Princess Mononoke,” despite being a massive hit in Japan — and a watershed moment for anime’s presence on the world stage — struggled to find a foothold with American audiences who are seldom asked to acknowledge their hatred, and even more seldom challenged to harness it. Certainly not by a “cartoon.”

But Miyazaki was ready to drop the gauntlet in no uncertain terms. “I love you,” San the wolf girl tells the warrior prince in the movie’s final moments, “but I’ll never forgive the human race.” After 133 minutes and 144,000 animation cels (a masochistic number of which were touched by Miyazaki’s own hands), it’s possible to understand how both parts of that line can be true at the same time. —DE

5. “The Boy and the Heron” (2023)

How does someone follow one of the greatest and most profoundly summative farewells the movies have ever seen? By definition, they don’t. They retire, or they die. Or they retire and then they die. In some rare cases, it even seems like they die because they retired. And then there’s 82-year-old filmmaker and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, always in a category of his own, who’s formally or informally quit the business no fewer than seven times of the course of his illustrious career, most recently after the 2013 release of his magnum opus “The Wind Rises.” That film — a fictionalized biopic about aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi — ended with someone concluding “we must live,” in spite of all things. Miyazaki’s new last film (for now) asks how, and then offers its own kind of answer.

The story of an angry and grieving child named Mahito who loses his mother in a 1943 hospital fire and then moves to the Japanese countryside so that his father can marry the boy’s aunt, “The Boy and the Heron” kicks into high gear once an Iago-like bird lures Mahito into a parallel universe with promises of reuniting with his mother. Already one of the most beautiful movies ever drawn, Miyazaki’s film becomes transcendent from that point on, resolving into a dream-like adventure that finds its creator nakedly reflecting on his legacy. And while this dream-like warble of a swan song may be too pitchy and scattered to hit with the gale-force power that made “The Wind Rises” feel like such a definitive farewell, “The Boy and the Heron” finds Miyazaki so nakedly bidding adieu — to us, and to the crumbling kingdom of dreams and madness that he’ll soon leave behind — that it somehow resolves into an even more fitting goodbye, one graced with the divine awe and heart-stopping wistfulness of watching a true immortal make peace with their own death. —DE

4. “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988)

Far and away the humblest movie that Hayao Miyazaki has ever made (and likely also the most beloved), “My Neighbor Totoro” is an 86-minute fable about two small girls adjusting to their rickety new house in rural mid-century Japan while their mother convalesces from an unspecified illness at a nearby hospital. The younger sister follows a trail of acorns into the woods, where she befriends a massive, bear-like wood spirit who likes to sleep a lot. One night the girls show Totoro how to use an umbrella as they wait for their father’s bus in the rain. Later, the locals grow concerned over an urgent corn delivery gone wrong, but the crisis is averted with appropriate sweetness. The end.

To look at “My Neighbor Totoro” from a certain perspective, that’s really all there is to it. More stuff happens before the opening credits of several Pixar movies, whose stories are as intricate and fussed over as a Swiss watch. Indeed, it’s fair to say that few of the masterpieces on this list would prove more baffling to those who only think of movies as plot delivery mechanisms, and even fewer would be so inconceivable to the A.I. tools that some people see as the future of animation (as opposed to, in Miyazaki’s words, “an insult to life itself”). 

And yet kids around the globe have always understood “My Neighbor Totoro” so implicitly that it’s as if they’re seeing their own imaginations reflected back at them on-screen. Some of that magic can be attributed to the movie’s aesthetic virtues: Joe Hisashi’s reassuring score is full of tunes that stick to your bones for life, while the hand-drawn animation is vibrant and detailed in a way that continues to humiliate even the most artful CGI (the summer breeze in Studio Ghibli’s films is more expressive than any of the main characters in “Frozen”). But those effervescent joys, which can be found in so much of Miyazaki’s work, become singularly potent in a movie that takes the mysterious beauty of our world as its main subject.

Softening — but never domesticating — the animistic spirit that leads to war in “Nausicaä” and “Princess Mononoke,” “My Neighbor Totoro” is a fundamentally moral story about the magic that avails itself to those who don’t live their lives in fear. It’s a movie about two little girls who find new strength in the unknown when confronted with every child’s greatest fear; who learn to laugh away the things that scare them and rescue each other from their darkest thoughts. Miyazaki deliberately emphasizes the most frightening aspects of Totoro’s design, often isolating his giant claws away from his less intimidating features, so that viewers of all ages are invited to appreciate the warmth that’s often lost inside fear’s shadow.

There’s a reason why the film’s most euphoric scene takes place during a downpour, just as there’s a reason why the Cronenbergian Cat Bus, with its piercing spotlight eyes and mutable flesh, has become a universal symbol of rescue. In Miyazaki’s world, the only thing worth being afraid of is losing the people you love. It’s a fear the young heroines of “My Neighbor Totoro” are forced to stare at directly in the face, but in doing so their eyes are opened to a world of wonder right in their new backyard, and everyone who sees this movie comes away knowing just where to find it. —DE

3. “Porco Rosso” (1992)

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, he had to turn into swine. Still the most purely enjoyable movie that Hayao Miyazaki has ever made, “Porco Rosso” splits the difference between “Casablanca” and “Bojack Horseman” to tell the bittersweet story of a World War I fighter pilot who survived the dogfight that killed the rest of his squadron, and is forced to spend the rest of his days with the head of a pig, hunting bounties over the sparkling blue waters of the Adriatic Sea while pining for the beautiful owner of the local hotel (who happens to be his dead wingman’s former wife). It’s the stuff of classic Miyazaki, not only for its ambient feminism and fetishistic love of vintage flying machines, which “The Wind Rises” would later revisit in a less fantastical setting, but also for its wistful despair at an irrevocably corrupted world.

It’s no accident that “Porco Rosso” is set at the height of the interwar period, the film’s hyper-fluid animation and general air of frivolity shadowed by the looming specter of fascism and a deep sense of future nostalgia for all that would be forfeited to it. But there’s also such a rich vein of fun to it — this is a movie that feels as breezy and ecstatic as flying a Ghibli plane through a clear summer afternoon (or at least as ecstatic as it makes that seem). That joy always comes back to the devil may care Porco himself, a surly loner who’s part Rick Blaine, part Giancarlo Giannani, and entirely wanted by the Italian government for “treason, decadence, pornography, and being a filthy pig.” Which leads to Porco’s unforgettable response: “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” This may be one of Miyazaki’s lightest films, but that line alone carries the weight of an entire career. —DE

2. “Spirited Away” (2001)

There’s something beautiful and terrifying about getting exactly what you wish for. The stunning jewel in Hayao Miyazaki’s pocketful of masterpieces follows young Chihiro on a fantastical sojourn through a land of cursed animals, malicious witches, and amorphous blobs that devour humans with minimal effort. It’s the textbook Miyazaki blend of wonder and danger that makes this a modern fairy tale on par with the time-tested stories of Grimm and Aesop and the countless oral traditions that spin yarns of all that the wide world has in store.

What better lesson for a child moving through a strange, treacherous journey that heroes and villains can swap places in an instant, that a hand extended in good faith can be used for terror and that an evil enemy can one day be redeemed? No-Face, Yubaba and Zeniba, Haku: all rich stewards of a story that can be taken as a parable for young adulthood, our modern relationship to nature, the way we treat our elders, or all of those things in one. In tone, color, and thematic ideas, this is as kaleidoscopic as Studio Ghibli gets, all delivered with the grace and control of a storytelling master.

The ending is a perfect distillation of what it means to be transported to an unfamiliar, magical visual world and to be returned safely. You’re still in one piece, but there’s something changed that you can’t quite put a finger on. It’s the great promise of film, animated or otherwise, one rendered here with as much honesty as fantasy allows. —SG

1. “The Wind Rises” (2013)

A (heavily fictionalized and composited) biopic of the Japanese engineer who designed the A6M Zero fighter jets that were used to attack Pearl Harbor, “The Wind Rises” isn’t just the only movie that Miyazaki has ever made about a real person, it’s also such a raw and revealing look at the true cost of artistic creation that it doubles as a devastatingly bittersweet self-portrait. Some people have argued that the film glosses over Japan’s role in World War II and paints the Nazi-allied nation as a victim rather than a perpetrator, but others point towards the latent guilt that Miyazaki has drawn into every scene of a film that reflects upon the volatile relationship between the purity of our dreams and the violence required for them to become real.

Miyazaki has always been obsessed with aeronautics, but he’s been just as consumed by various kinds of corruption, including that of his family at the hands of a workaholic father. Yes, “The Wind Rises” is a three-hankie melodrama that empathizes with a man who conceived of killing machines, but it’s one that Miyazaki devastatingly reframes into the story of someone struggling to justify their art in a world eager to condemn even its most beautiful dreams as weapons of war. At the time of its release, I was convinced that this bittersweet personal statement was too perfect a swansong for Miyazaki to bother making another film. In hindsight, however, “The Wind Rises” is just as clearly a film about why he’ll never be able to just put down his pencil and walk away forever — not when using it is the only way he knows how to draw air into his lungs. “The wind is rising!” the poet said. “We must try to live.” —DE