All Studio Ghibli Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

Studio Ghibli has been gently revolutionizing the animation world since 1986, combining an endearing and empathetic worldview with rousing adventure. That was the year of their debut feature, Castle in the Sky, which heralded the superstar team of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. (Nausicaa, which we’re including on this list, was made before Ghibli’s founding but has been culturally adopted as part of of filmography.) Miyazaki has been Studio Ghibli’s global champion, and rounded out the rest of the ’80s with My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. And it wasn’t long before producer Takahata wore the director’s hat, crafting the somber Grave of the Fireflies, which played as a double feature with Totoro in Japan.

(See also: The 100 best anime movies of all time.)

Entering the ’90s, the two Ghibli founders went toe-to-toe with Porco Rosso and Only Yesterday. The latter was by Takahata, establishing him as a more dramatically grounded artist as compared to Miyazaki’s literal flights of fancy. But it is Miyazaki’s fantastical stories that have proven popular internationally, from the ecological war epic Princess Mononoke to the witchcraft and wizardry of Howl’s Moving Castle to the Oscar-winning masterpiece Spirited Away. The Tale of Princess Kaguya was Takahata’s final film before his death in 2018.

Other directors at Studio Ghibli include Miyazaki’s son Goro (Tales from Earthsea, From Up on Poppy Hill) and Hiromasa Yonebayashi (Arrietty, When Marnie Was There), who subsequently left to found Studio Ponoc after Ghibli went into hiatus in 2014 following Miyazaki’s retirement. This isn’t the first time he’s announced retirement (he did so after Ponyo, and after The Wind Rises), and he’s back at it again with The Boy and the Heron, an adaptation of the young-adult novel How Do You Live?. Now we rank all of Studio Ghibli’s movies by Tomatometer, Certified Fresh films first! —Alex Vo