The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
I still think about Spirited Away at random moments. The way No-Face moves through the bathhouse. The sound of the train. I’ve watched Miyazaki’s films enough times that they’ve woven themselves into my thinking like memories of places I actually lived, except they were never real.
Mami Sunada spent a year inside Studio Ghibli filming during a specific moment: Miyazaki stepping back from directing, the studio faced with a transition nobody was quite ready for. He captures the animators in their routines, the precise exhaustion of frame-by-frame work, the daily labor of translating imagination into motion. The documentary is mostly about work—what it costs to maintain those standards for decades without compromise, and about the invisible people who do the actual drawing while one name becomes synonymous with the entire output.
There’s something unsettling about watching a film where the subject is a master reaching the end of an era. Not because Miyazaki is diminished—he’s still sharp, still visionary—but because the camera catches the moment when his creation has to learn to exist without him at the center. An ending pretending to be a transition.
I’m not sure what comes next for Studio Ghibli. The films that matter to me are already made. But there’s something strange about having those films documented this way, seeing the people behind the magic while he’s still alive, still aware of how the spell is being pulled apart. The mystery doesn’t fade when you see the craft underneath it. If anything it deepens—knowing these weren’t miracles, just people, tired and exacting, making something that would outlast them.
The documentary doesn’t offer conclusions. It just shows the work, the moment of transition, and then stops. Miyazaki is still there, the studio is still there, but something has shifted. He’s not coming back. Maybe that’s right.