The web is abuzz with Studio Ghibli.
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Sam Altman’s OpenAI had just unveiled its latest image-generation technology in Chat-GPT4o when suddenly the entire interior of Elon Musk’s palace turned to animated dust. Animated Trump, animated Nixon, animated 9/11. Altman’s transformation tool, quickly copied by Grok and other AI agents, lets users transform photos and videos into the mesmerizing anime style of Studio Ghibli, the production company of famed Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki.
Nixon x Ghibli pic.twitter.com/7RtQzUJaS0
— Richard Nixon Foundation (@nixonfoundation) March 26, 2025
Social media couldn’t get enough. Everywhere you looked, there was yet another Studio Ghibli-style cartoon character flooding social media. By midday, a memecoin called “Ghiblification” had ballooned to a market cap of over $20 million. Before the sun set in America, even Musk himself had posted an image of Ghiblified parodying The Lion King, depicting the Tesla titan as a monkey hoisting the DOGE mascot from the Dogecoin meme cryptocurrency. It was all very 2025.
It was the dead of night in Japan when the first Ghibli memes began going viral on 𝕏. I couldn’t help but think of Miyazaki. The creator of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, and many other animated classics, Miyazaki was not only a master of storytelling but also a visionary who took great pride in the craftsmanship of his artists. The 84-year-old director left no doubt about his displeasure with the advances in artificial intelligence when he was shown a basic model in 2017.
“I firmly believe that this is an insult to life itself,” Miyazaki told the astonished engineers who had just shown him their latest mutant AI creations. “I am completely disgusted. If you really want to do weird things, keep doing them. I would never want to implement this technology into my work.” The young engineers were then asked to explain why they were pursuing such a project. “We would like to create a machine that can paint pictures like humans do.” Miyazaki’s eyes could not hide his anguish and disappointment at the technological advances knocking at his door.
With Ghibli memes swirling around 𝕏 this week, a video of Miyazaki’s painstaking animation process went viral on the platform on Wednesday afternoon. In the clip, Miyazaki rushes out of his upcoming film to check out the finished footage with his own eyes. “Drawing a crowd takes time and effort, so animators usually avoid it,” the narrator says. “But not Miyazaki.” One scene in particular features a crowd of people, hundreds of figures moving past each other on a busy street. The four-second clip took the animators more than a year to complete. When one of the key animators remarks that the scene is “so short” despite the labor involved in creating it, Miyazaki simply replies, “But it was worth it.”
By Thursday morning, an animated version of the Studio Ghibli-style Lord of the Rings: Fellowship trailer had gone viral on 𝕏. Its creator said he “spent $250 and 9 hours” of work to recreate the trailer frame by frame. What used to take weeks or months to develop with dozens of artists could now be replicated in a basement for virtually no cost. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
