The best scenes from Studio Ghibli movies
Ask any experienced animation fan what movies make up the essential anime viewing list, and odds are good that each and every one of them will cite at least a few films from Studio Ghibli, the internationally beloved animation home of creative pioneers Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. From the games they’ve inspired to the rules they’ve broken, Ghibli’s movies are memorable and inspirational, enough that animators still admire and acknowledge them to this day. But where to start with Studio Ghibli? Everyone has their own opinion, and their own ranking in terms of which films are most essential and most immersive.
At Polygon, we do have a single clear favorite Studio Ghibli movie, but after that, we break ranks in terms of what we love most. So instead of ranking the movies themselves, we ranked our favorite scenes from Ghibli movies — the strongest, most memorable moments that have stuck with us, in some cases decades after we first saw them.
[ Ed. note: This list has been updated to include 2023’s The Boy and the Heron .]
The most memorable moment in Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Secret World of Arrietty, based on Mary Norton’s Borrower books, isn’t dynamic or explosive. It’s a hushed, drawn-out experience where the biggest action is a character stopping to gape. Arrietty is a Borrower, a doll-sized girl whose equally teeny family lives inside the walls of a human family’s vast country house. At 13, she’s permitted to accompany her taciturn father Pod into that house for the first time, on a quiet raid to get some supplies: a single sugar cube and a single tissue.
On paper, the sequence might play like a thrilling heist movie, with Arrietty fighting off an immense, aggressive cockroach, ziplining up a narrow vertical space, and rappelling off a cabinet to the ground far below. But these events play out softly as a sweet coming-of-age ritual. Pod silently supports his daughter and smiles at her daring, and Arrietty alternates between boldness and nervousness. And
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