The Real Secrets of Studio Ghibli: Facts, Welsh Mining Towns, and the Magic of “Ma”

If you’ve ever felt that particular ache in your chest while watching Totoro wait at the bus stop, or found yourself unconsciously holding your breath during Chihiro’s train ride across the flooded tracks, then you already understand what makes Studio Ghibli different.

The internet is awash with possible “secrets” about these films: hidden death gods, mysterious frequencies, impossible numerical patterns. But in this article, we will take a look at some of the interesting facts.

The Studio’s Origins: Hot Desert Winds and Two Horse Power

Before Studio Ghibli existed, Miyazaki ran a personal office called “Nibariki,” meaning “Two Horse Power,” a nickname for the Citroën 2CV he drove. In April 1984, he and Isao Takahata created this studio to handle copyright for their work.

But when founding their animation studio in 1985, they chose a different name entirely. “Ghibli” comes from the Italian noun for a hot Saharan wind, which was also the nickname for Italy’s Caproni Ca.309 reconnaissance plane. Miyazaki, whose love of aviation runs through nearly every film he’s made, chose the name deliberately. He wanted the studio to “blow a new wind through the anime industry.”

Easter Egg Watch: That Caproni connection wasn’t forgotten. Decades later, Giovanni Caproni himself appears as a character in The Wind Rises, inspiring the protagonist in his dreams. If you watch that film, pay attention to the dream sequences. Miyazaki had been carrying that seed for thirty years, and you can trace his aviation obsession all the way back to the studio’s name.

The Unfinished Script: How Ghibli Films Actually Get Made

Miyazaki’s films don’t have scripts.

“I don’t have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film,” Miyazaki told Midnight Eye in 2002. “I usually don’t have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keep working on the film as it develops.”

Spirited Away, the most successful film in Japanese history until 2020, winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, was created without anyone knowing how it would end until they were already deep into production.

“It’s not me who makes the film,” Miyazaki has said. “The film makes itself and I have no choice but to follow.”

Isao Takahata worked completely differently. While Miyazaki dove in and discovered his stories, Takahata would spend years in preparation. The Tale of Princess Kaguya took eight years to complete. These opposing methods, one intuitive and improvisational, the other meticulous and deliberate, somehow both produced masterpieces under the same roof.

The Welsh Connection: Where Castle in the Sky Really Came From

Here’s something you won’t find in most Ghibli retrospectives: Miyazaki visited Wales twice, and both trips fundamentally shaped Castle in the Sky.

His first visit came in 1984, during the miners’ strike itself. While Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki stayed behind in Japan setting up what would become Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki travelled 5,914 miles to the Rhondda valleys in South Wales. He arrived while communities were in the thick of their year-long battle against pit closures, watching families band together against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.

What did he actually do there? He drew. Wikipedia confirms he spent his time “drawing the mining villages and communities of Rhondda.” He sketched the terraced houses clinging to hillsides. He observed the medieval castles, particularly Caerphilly, Caernarfon, and Powis Castle, which would later inspire Laputa’s design. The garden terraces of Powis Castle are particularly visible in the floating island’s architecture if you know where to look.

He returned in May 1985 specifically to research the film, this time with production already underway. By then, the strike had ended in defeat. The miners had marched back to work on 3 March 1985, banners still held high, but everyone knew the industry was dying. Miyazaki witnessed both the fight and its aftermath.

“I was in Wales just after the miners’ strike,” he told The Guardian in 2005. “I really admired the way the miners’ unions fought to the very end for their jobs and communities, and I wanted to reflect the strength of those communities in my film. I admired those men, I admired the way they battled to save their way of life, just as the coal miners in Japan did. Many people of my generation see the miners as a symbol; a dying breed of fighting men. Now they are gone.”

That last line hits differently when you know the context. Miyazaki was thinking of the Miike coal mine strikes in Japan during the early 1960s, another labour battle crushed by government intervention. He saw the same story playing out across two countries, two cultures, two communities being systematically dismantled.

Easter Egg Watch: You can see Wales everywhere in Castle in the Sky. Pazu’s village, nestled in mountains with traditional terrace houses, could be lifted directly from the Rhondda. Next time you watch the opening scenes, look at the architecture. Those narrow streets, the way the buildings stack up the hillsides, the intimate community where everyone knows each other. That’s not generic fantasy design. That’s what Miyazaki sketched in his notebooks while walking through Welsh mining towns.

No photographs from these trips have surfaced publicly, despite extensive archival searches. If you know of any, get in touch. The visual record of Miyazaki’s time in Wales exists only in his sketches, which became the film’s design foundation. Those drawings are the reason a Japanese animated film looks so authentically like the South Wales valleys.

The mining community that bands together to protect Pazu and Sheeta echoes the real solidarity Miyazaki witnessed. The landscape, with its intimate connection between people and the earth, reflects what Welsh poet G. Jones described as Wales’ meaning being found “in some corner of a field, a pool under a rock, in a bare sheep walk or cottage folded in a gully.”

The Welsh Connection, Part Two: Howl’s Moving Castle

Wales stayed with Miyazaki. Nearly two decades after those trips to the Rhondda, he returned to Welsh source material for Howl’s Moving Castle.

The 2004 film is based on the 1986 novel by Diana Wynne Jones, a British author who was raised in Wales during the Second World War. Her book follows a Welsh wizard whose real name is Howell Jenkins, a man who travels between magical realms and modern day Wales, at one point returning to visit a house in Swansea.

Miyazaki’s adaptation lifts the story into an imaginary European landscape, but the Welsh bones remain visible. The rolling green hills, the quaint villages, the sense of a world caught between old magic and encroaching modernity. And if you watch the English language version, listen carefully: Howl briefly speaks Welsh, one of the few instances of the language appearing in anime.

Jones’ novel and Miyazaki’s film share something beyond geography. Both are interested in identity and transformation, in people who wear different faces in different worlds. Howl literally has multiple names and appearances. Sophie ages and de-ages throughout the story. It’s fitting that this shape-shifting tale originated with a writer who grew up navigating between Welsh and English cultures during wartime.

The River That Became a Spirit

One of the most memorable scenes in Spirited Away features a “stink spirit” arriving at the bathhouse, a creature so foul that everyone recoils. Chihiro discovers a bicycle handle protruding from its side, and after an enormous effort to pull it out, reveals that the creature is actually a polluted river god, poisoned by human garbage.

This came directly from Miyazaki’s life. “I cleaned a river once,” he explained in the Japanese Press Notes for Spirited Away. “My local river. And there really was a bicycle. It was stuck in there. Ten of us wrapped a rope around the bars and slowly pulled it out. We really cleaned up the river, and the fish are back. And that’s why I added that scene.”

This is what makes Ghibli films resonate so deeply. They’re not assembled from marketing data or focus grouped into existence. They emerge from real experiences, real observations, real emotions. When you watch that scene, you’re watching something that actually happened to someone who cared enough to put it on screen.

The Double Feature That Changed Everything

Here’s a piece of genuine Ghibli history that sounds made up: when My Neighbor Totoro premiered in Japanese theatres in 1988, it was shown as a double feature with Grave of the Fireflies.

One film is a warm, gentle story about childhood wonder and forest spirits. The other is one of the most devastating depictions of war’s impact on children ever committed to film. Miyazaki’s celebration of innocence followed by Takahata’s unflinching portrayal of its destruction.

The intent was deliberate. After experiencing the horrors of Grave of the Fireflies, audiences would be taken out of that darkness and into a world of healing with Totoro. The two films were designed to work together: devastation followed by restoration, grief followed by wonder.

Neither film was a major box office success at the time. Totoro received critical acclaim but only modest ticket sales. It wasn’t until Studio Ghibli approved merchandising rights in 1990 that Totoro became the cultural phenomenon we know today. The merchandise profits were eventually enough to sustain the entire studio.

The Cat Who Stopped Talking

In Kiki’s Delivery Service, there’s a moment that troubles many viewers: Kiki loses her ability to understand her cat Jiji, and unlike her flying powers, this ability never returns. In the Japanese version, anyway. The Disney dub added a line suggesting she could understand him again.

Miyazaki made this choice deliberately. “Jiji represents the childish side of Kiki,” he explained in the film’s production notes, “and the reason why she loses her ability to communicate with him is because she has grown up.”

It’s not a curse or a tragedy. It’s part of becoming an adult. Kiki starts her journey surrounded by familiar things: her father’s radio, her mother’s broom, her childhood companion who speaks her language. One by one, she loses these connections. The radio plays foreign stations. She breaks the broom. Jiji no longer speaks to her.

But look at what she gains: her own broom (well, a deck brush), her own friends, her own place in the world. She and Jiji remain close. The credits show them flying together with his kittens. Their relationship has matured into something new. This isn’t loss. It’s growth.

The Curse That Isn’t Magic

Porco Rosso never explains how its protagonist became a pig. There’s no wicked sorcerer, no enchanted object, no spell to break. A man simply woke up one day transformed.

According to Studio Ghibli’s press materials, Marco “was disillusioned with humanity, and cursed himself to be a pig.” Miyazaki put it more bluntly: “When a man becomes middle aged, he becomes a pig.”

The film shows us what happened. During the Great War, Marco survived a battle that killed everyone around him, including his best friend, who had just married the woman Marco loved. He saw the spirits of dead pilots rising into the clouds, but he remained behind, alive.

His transformation isn’t magic. It’s shame. It’s survivor’s guilt made visible. He sees himself as unworthy of humanity, so his outside reflects what he believes his inside to be. The film’s ending is deliberately ambiguous. We never clearly see whether Marco becomes human again. Because that’s not really the point. The question isn’t whether the curse breaks. The question is whether Marco can forgive himself.

The Spaces Between

Miyazaki’s films contain something he calls “ma,” and the bus stop scene in My Neighbor Totoro is perhaps its purest expression.

You know the scene. Satsuki and Mei are waiting in the rain for their father’s bus. Mei has fallen asleep on her sister’s back. The night is getting darker. Vehicles pass, but none of them carry their father. The girls are worried about their mother in hospital. They’re worried their father won’t come. They’re confronting, in their quiet way, the possibility of being left alone.

The scene runs for nearly seven minutes. In a film that’s only 86 minutes long, that’s a significant commitment to watching two children wait for a bus. Almost nothing happens. A toad croaks in the mud. Rain drums on the umbrella. Satsuki shifts her weight. The tension builds not through action but through its absence.

Then Totoro appears.

Satsuki notices an enormous paw beside her. She looks up. There he is, standing at the bus stop as though this were the most natural thing in the world, wearing only a leaf on his head against the rain. She offers him her father’s umbrella. He accepts it. The first raindrop hits the umbrella and Totoro’s eyes widen with delight. More drops fall. He discovers he loves the sound. He jumps, and the trees shake loose a thunderclap of water. He grins that enormous grin.

This is what Miyazaki means by “ma.” In his interview with Roger Ebert, he clapped his hands three or four times to demonstrate. “The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.”

The bus stop scene works because of everything that comes before the magic. Seven minutes of worry, of rain, of waiting. The mundane made transcendent precisely because we earned it. When the Catbus finally arrives, its twelve legs churning through the night, it doesn’t feel like a deus ex machina. It feels like a reward for patience.

Film School Rejects noted that when they screened Totoro to an audience including small children who couldn’t read the subtitles, the kids sat in total silence for 86 minutes. “Not a peep or a fidget, just silent sets of wide eyes fixed firmly on the screen.” That’s ma in action. Children don’t need constant stimulation. They need space to feel.

This is why Ghibli films feel different from typical animation. They trust their audience. They understand that sometimes the most powerful storytelling happens in silence, in the space between events, in the quiet moments that let you bring your own emotions to the screen.

What the Debunked Theories Tell Us

The internet is full of “dark” theories about Studio Ghibli films. Totoro is supposedly a death god. The children in My Neighbor Totoro are supposedly dead. Seita’s ghost supposedly appears throughout Grave of the Fireflies.

Studio Ghibli has explicitly denied these theories. “Everyone, please put your minds at ease,” the studio stated. “The rumors of Totoro being a death god, Mei being dead, and other rumors of the like are absolutely not true. Someone made them up because they sounded interesting to him or her, and it seems to have spread around the Internet.”

Producer Toshio Suzuki addressed the claim that Satsuki and Mei don’t have shadows in the final scene: “It was merely decided that it wasn’t necessary to draw when producing the animation.”

But these theories persist because these films mean so much to people. You want there to be hidden depths, secret layers, mysteries to uncover. You want your beloved films to contain more than you initially saw.

The truth is, they do. Just not in the ways the theories suggest. The depths are in Miyazaki’s memories of his mother’s illness (which inspired Totoro‘s hospitalised mother). They’re in Takahata’s meticulous historical research. They’re in the real Welsh mining villages and cleaned-up rivers and childhood experiences that became animated masterpieces.

The Real Magic

There’s no hidden frequency making you cry. No secret numerical pattern connecting the films. No conspiracy waiting to be uncovered.

What there is, is this: a studio that was founded to “blow a new wind” through animation, led by artists who worked without scripts because they trusted their instincts, who based their fantasy worlds on real places they’d visited and real rivers they’d cleaned, who understood that growing up means losing some things while gaining others, who knew that sometimes the most powerful moments in a film are the quiet ones where nothing seems to happen.

The real secret of Studio Ghibli isn’t hidden in freeze frames or background details or numerical patterns. It’s right there on the surface, in every carefully drawn frame: these films were made by people who genuinely cared about what they were making.

That’s why they hurt so much to finish. Because something real was put into them. And something real comes back out.