Studio Ghibli After Hayao Miyazaki: What The Boy and the Heron Actually Means

Hayao Miyazaki turned 85 in January 2026. He has now formally announced his retirement four times — 1997 after Princess Mononoke, 2013 after The Wind Rises, 2014 a second time, and most recently in conjunction with the release of The Boy and the Heron in 2023. Each prior retirement has been followed, eventually, by another film. The pattern is part of why nobody in the Japanese animation press takes a Miyazaki retirement as final until the studio that bears his work shifts visibly to other directors.

That shift is the question Studio Ghibli is actively answering right now. The 2024 acquisition by Nippon TV, the inability of Goro Miyazaki to fully fill the founder’s directorial role, the absence of Isao Takahata (the studio’s other founder, who died in 2018), and the lack of a clearly anointed successor have all converged at the same time. Studio Ghibli in 2026 is in the most uncertain creative period of its existence.

This is the situation, what it actually means, and what the next decade probably looks like.

The structure that built Ghibli

Studio Ghibli was founded in June 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and producer Toshio Suzuki, after the unexpected success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) gave the team enough financial breathing room to start their own studio rather than continue at Topcraft or Telecom Animation. The studio’s structure was unusual from day one: in-house staff with salaries (not the freelance-per-cut model dominant elsewhere in anime), purpose-built training programs for new animators, and a deliberate refusal to take on more projects than the studio could produce at its own quality bar.

The catalog through 2008 is what most people think of when they think of “Ghibli”: Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Grave of the Fireflies (1988, Takahata), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Porco Rosso (1992), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo (2008). Two directors, Miyazaki and Takahata, alternating on a roughly two-year cycle.

This model worked because the studio had two top-tier directors with distinct visions but compatible aesthetics. When one was making a film, the other was preparing his next. The production rhythm sustained itself.

That ended in 2014. Takahata’s last film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, came out in 2013. He spent the rest of his life on smaller projects until his death in April 2018. Miyazaki announced retirement in 2013 (after The Wind Rises), then came back to direct The Boy and the Heron, which took roughly seven years to complete. The two-director rhythm has not been replaced.

What Goro Miyazaki has and hasn’t been

Hayao Miyazaki’s son Goro Miyazaki is the obvious succession candidate and has been, in practice, the studio’s third director since 2006. He has directed Tales from Earthsea (2006), From Up on Poppy Hill (2011), and Earwig and the Witch (2020).

The critical reception across the three films is, to be honest about it, mixed. Tales from Earthsea was poorly received both in Japan and abroad, with even Hayao Miyazaki publicly criticizing the production decisions. From Up on Poppy Hill recovered the family reputation somewhat — it’s a quieter, more contained film with a sharper screenplay (co-written by Hayao). Earwig and the Witch was Ghibli’s first 3DCG feature, made for NHK television rather than theatrical release; the reception was decidedly cool, with most reviewers noting that the 3D animation lost what makes Ghibli’s hand-drawn work distinctive.

The pattern across the three films is not that Goro Miyazaki is a bad director — Poppy Hill is genuinely good. It’s that he is not the kind of director who can carry a major studio’s identity the way his father has. Ghibli’s brand is so closely associated with Hayao Miyazaki’s specific sensibility that any successor working in a different register reads as a step down, regardless of objective quality.

The 2024 Nippon TV acquisition and what it changed

In September 2023, Nippon TV announced it had acquired a majority stake in Studio Ghibli. The deal was formally closed in early 2024. Toshio Suzuki framed it publicly as a succession solution — Ghibli’s leadership had spent years looking for a successor structure that would preserve the studio’s identity, had not found one internally, and concluded that becoming a Nippon TV subsidiary was the most stable path forward.

The acquisition matters for several reasons.

It eliminates the “what happens when Miyazaki and Suzuki are gone” question structurally. Ghibli now has corporate continuity that doesn’t depend on its founders. The studio will continue as an entity regardless of director succession.

It changes the kinds of projects Ghibli can take on. Nippon TV’s existing animation portfolio (including Lupin III, Detective Conan, and various co-productions) gives Ghibli access to broadcasting infrastructure it didn’t have as an independent. The studio can now consider television projects, streaming originals, and serialized formats it would not have prioritized under independent ownership.

It does not solve the creative succession. Becoming a Nippon TV subsidiary does not produce a new Miyazaki-tier director. The acquisition addresses the corporate question while leaving the creative one open.

The Boy and the Heron as a transition signal

The Boy and the Heron (Japanese title: How Do You Live?) released in Japan in July 2023 and globally over the following year. The film won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2024 — Ghibli’s second after Spirited Away. It is, by any reasonable measure, a serious late-career work and not the misstep that “auteur returns after a decade” films often are.

What’s worth noticing about the film, watched in 2026 with the studio’s current situation in mind, is the level of structural ambition. The Boy and the Heron is meta-narratively about a creator passing his world to a successor; the in-film mechanics of a tower that needs a new keeper are obvious enough that nobody has had to argue them. The film is, in addition to being a film, Miyazaki commenting on what happens to Ghibli when he’s gone.

This is the unusual thing about the studio’s current position. The founder has used his probably-last major work to dramatize the succession problem. The studio’s response has been to be acquired by a larger media company. Neither resolves the underlying creative question, but together they at least frame what the question is.

Who the studio still has

Ghibli in 2026 retains a roster of significant individual animators and craftspeople, even without a clear directorial successor. Atsushi Okui (cinematographer on most major Ghibli films since the 1990s). Kazuo Oga (background artist, the visual signature of My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke). Joe Hisaishi (composer, technically a long-time external collaborator but creatively core). Michiyo Yasuda (color designer, retired but trained much of the current color staff).

The technical staff is not the succession question; that staff exists and continues to produce work at the studio’s traditional quality bar. The question is who directs.

The internally most-discussed candidates outside Goro Miyazaki are Hiromasa Yonebayashi (director of The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) and When Marnie Was There (2014), now at Studio Ponoc), Yoshiyuki Momose (longtime Ghibli animator, art director on Princess Kaguya), and a handful of younger animators who have not yet had a directorial credit. None of them have the public profile that would make a “successor announcement” feel definitive.

What Studio Ponoc says about all this

Hiromasa Yonebayashi and producer Yoshiaki Nishimura left Ghibli in 2014-2015 to form Studio Ponoc. Their stated reason was disagreement with Ghibli’s direction during the production hiatus after Miyazaki’s 2013 retirement. Ponoc has since produced Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017), the Modest Heroes anthology (2018), and The Imaginary (2023). All three productions are visually Ghibli-adjacent in ways that no other studio’s work is.

The existence of Ponoc is, in a way, evidence that Ghibli’s creative DNA can survive outside the founding studio. It’s also evidence that the studio’s most plausible directorial successor chose to leave rather than wait for a succession that wasn’t happening internally.

What this means for Ghibli proper is that its likely future directors are either inside the studio and not yet announced, or are at Ponoc and may or may not return.

The catalog and where to start

If you’re approaching the Ghibli catalog systematically in 2026:

The five canonical Miyazaki masterworks: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle. These define the studio’s identity and are, individually, films most viewers can see annually without diminishing returns.

The Takahata catalog: Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, My Neighbors the Yamadas, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. Stylistically very different from Miyazaki’s work, often understated, and (in Grave of the Fireflies’ case) among the most emotionally heavy animated films ever made.

The Boy and the Heron: The current synthesis. Watch this last for full effect.

The full Studio Ghibli catalog with release dates and current licensed availability across 15+ Arab countries is on the studio page.

What the next decade looks like

The honest forecast for Studio Ghibli through 2035 is that the studio continues producing one or two theatrical features per decade, with directors who are not Hayao Miyazaki, with quality that is high but distinct from the founder’s voice. The studio survives because Nippon TV has made it survive corporately. The films continue because the staff is capable of producing them. The cultural footprint adjusts to reflect that Ghibli is now what Disney has been since Walt Disney died: an institution that carries its founder’s name without being its founder.

This is not a tragic outcome. Disney has produced some of its strongest work decades after Walt. The same trajectory is available to Ghibli. What’s lost is the singular voice that built the studio, and that loss is not recoverable. What’s preserved is the institution. That’s a reasonable trade, and it’s the trade Ghibli has, deliberately or not, chosen to make.