What Miyazaki Looks Like in Eight Colors

British artist Richard Evans took Studio Ghibli’s greatest films and rebuilt them as 8-bit NES sprites—Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, rendered in the blocky palette of a Famicom cartridge. It’s one of those image series you scroll through slowly, which doesn’t happen as often as it should.

What makes it work is that Ghibli’s visual grammar translates surprisingly well to pixel art. The clarity of Miyazaki’s character design—silhouettes that read instantly, colors that carry emotional weight—survives compression down to a few dozen pixels. Totoro at eight bits is still unmistakably Totoro. The forest in Princess Mononoke is still threatening in four shades of green. Something about the original art is so elemental it holds.

There’s also something pleasingly honest about the combination. Both Ghibli films and early video games ask you to project feeling onto images that can’t quite contain it. You fill the gap yourself. Evans’ remixes push that to an extreme, and the nostalgia doubles—for the films and for the machines you played on as a kid—until you’re not sure which one you’re mourning.