Every Studio Ghibli Animated Film, Ranked Worst to Best
Updated February 1, 2021 to add Earwig and the Witch.
There has never been a better time to revisit the Studio Ghibli catalog. Founded in the mid-1980s by a group of animators led by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, the Japanese studio is almost without peer in the world of animation, releasing 20 critically acclaimed features (and just one dud) over three decades. Recently, the entire Ghibli catalog was added to a variety of digital services (like Amazon, YouTube, and iTunes) for the first time ever (in both their subtitled Japanese original versions and Disney-produced English-language dubs), and all of the films will be available to stream for free to subscribers on day one when HBO Max launches at the end of May.
Wondering where to start? In the gallery above, we rank every Studio Ghibli release from worst to absolute best, according to their Metascores (which measure the opinions of top professional film critics).
Photo credits: Studio Ghibli, Toei (slide 18)
The second feature directed by Hayao Miyazaki (following 1979's The Castle of Cagliostro, aka Lupin III), this 1984 sci-fi/fantasy epic about warring nations on a dying planet draws from Miyazaki's own manga released two years prior. A butchered version of the film was screened in America later that decade under the title Warriors of the Wind, but it didn't get a proper release in the States (with a new voice cast led by Alison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, and Shia LaBeouf) until 2005.
This one might not count, though. Released one year before Studio Ghibli was officially founded in 1985, Nausicaä (obviously) is not technically a Studio Ghibli release. Still, it is often grouped with the studio's other works, even by Ghibli itself, which has included the film in its DVD collections.
“The action sequences are as suspenseful as any in the director's career; the most impressive scenes, though, may be the slower ones, which consider how humanity might evolve after driving itself to near extinction.” —Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader
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