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)
Easily on the shortlist of the greatest animated films ever made, Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 masterpiece features one magical sequence after another as it follows a young girl who is transported into a spirit-inhabited fantasy realm and must find her way back to the real world and rescue her parents, who have been turned into pigs by a witch. When it was released in Japan, it became the highest-grossing film—animated or live-action—of all time in that country, a record that remains to this day.
Disney released an English-language dub in the U.S., and that film went on to take home an Oscar for best animated feature. It is still Studio Ghibli's only win in that category.
“It is plainly, though not simply, a masterpiece from an acknowledged master of contemporary animation, and a wonderfully welcoming work of art that's as funny and entertaining as it is brilliant, beautiful and deep.” —Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
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