I would now like to bring you back down to Earth with Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday (1991), a truly wonderful movie without any fantastical elements whatsoever. The story of a young girl crossing into a magical world is simple enough, but it provides the backdrop for some of the most outlandish and creative animation ever committed to celluloid. It’s dense, lavish, ambitious, and all around an incredible achievement. Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) is Studio Ghibli’s most successful movie, and while I wouldn’t rank it this high as a personal favorite, I’d recommend watching it early on because it’ll show you a lot about the range of the studio’s work. My next suggestion is nothing like it at all. Castle in the Sky is wildly entertaining and set a high bar for what was to follow. Some of the most iconic Ghibli imagery, from the ancient robot guards to the titular floating castle, comes from this movie, and Joe Hisaishi’s synth-heavy soundtrack remains instantly recognizable today. This film perhaps lacks some of the pathos of Ghibli’s later work, but it holds up incredibly well as a spirited fantasy adventure in the vein of Star Wars or Indiana Jones. Not to kick off with a curveball or anything, but I think the best place to start with Studio Ghibli would be its first movie, Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986). This is obviously very subjective, and even then I’m not necessarily putting my favorites toward the top of the list this is about easing you into the studio’s work and making sure you don’t write it all off after accidentally watching Tales from Earthsea. Rather than outright ranking the movies, which would be a truly impossible task, I thought I’d put together a guide that would hopefully help people getting into Ghibli for the first time.

The overall quality is very high, but there are definitely some oddball films that wouldn’t be the best place to jump in. These movies are diverse in tone and style, with little to no connection between them beyond certain recurring motifs and themes.

To Ghibli first-timers, though, it might not be immediately obvious where to start. Studio Ghibli never even sold digital versions of its films until recently, so the shift to streaming will surely mean more people checking them out than ever before. That’s a lot of potentially life-changing material to discover. With the addition of the majority of the studio’s back catalog to the new HBO Max streaming service in the US, along with its earlier arrival on Netflix elsewhere, you now have one of the greatest collections of movies of all time on tap. If you’ve never seen a Studio Ghibli film before, I’m honestly kind of jealous.

Spirited away english dub subtitles