In the opening of his book, Now Go: On Grief and Studio Ghibli, writer and author Karl Thomas Smith asks: “What do you think of when you hear ‘Studio Ghibli’?” For some, he observes, the name will evoke watercolour skies, pastel sunsets, or the “pang of childhood nostalgia”. Smith, however, thinks of his grandparents – of grief. “I think of a world that is imbued with a sense of more,” he writes, “even when that comes, in part, from what is taken.”

The fantastical worlds created by the Japanese animation house do indeed permeate with loss – though some more explicitly than others. It can be found in Spirited Away, when a young girl is put to work after her parents are turned into pigs; in Grave of the Fireflies, which tells the story of two orphaned siblings; in My Neighbour Totoro, where two sisters find comfort in a magical spirit, as their mother endures a long-term illness; the list goes on.

In his book – released as part of 404 Ink’s Inklings series, which comprises shorter books on singular, fairly niche, topics – Smith explores how these films grapple with grief in all its pluralities, and reflects on the enduring influence of Ghibli’s honest approach to the topic, particularly for its often-young audience. “The films treat children and young people as whole human beings, deserving of respect and honesty, but also of care and a gentler touch,” he writes. “They do not need to be lied to – in fact, they can and should be told the entire truth lest they stumble upon the truth themselves and are hurt more deeply than they should have been.”

Although Smith himself came to Studio Ghibli’s films as an adult, he believes he did grow up watching them – just “not in the traditional sense”. For him, the films’ impact lies primarily in his own experience, understanding, and acceptance of grief, and in the practical tools they’ve given him to survive it. “What I get is ways of thinking, processing, and coming to terms – through the magic, fantasy, and myth – with the reality of what’s happening,” he tells Dazed. “These movies are a mirror. They show you something of yourself.”

Below, Smith reflects on what makes Studio Ghibli’s approach to grief so unique, how the films helped him navigate his own bereavements, and what the process of writing the book taught him about loss.

How did Now Go: Grief and Studio Ghibli come about?

Karl Thomas Smith: I started thinking about this back in 2018 when I wrote an essay on Grave of the Fireflies for The Quietus, but it’s not something I’d been actively working on until I saw 404 Ink’s call-out for pitches. Their Inklings series seemed like the right fit for something like this: Ghibli being a popular topic with broad appeal and grief being neither popular nor appealing, but unfortunately universal.

I’ve been working on the book for most of this year, although I should have been working on it for much less of the year and it should have been out much earlier. I’d pitched it with some distance from grief – not with objectivity, but safe in the knowledge that enough time had passed for me to dig into all this without hitting too many exposed nerves. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out like that, and during the writing process grief worked its way back into my life. A nerve was very much exposed, and the whole thing ended up being more raw, prescient, and difficult to engage with than I’d expected. Maybe that means the final product is actually better. Maybe the book I’d intended to write wouldn’t be striking that same nerve for as many other people as this one seems to be.

What feels so poignant to you about the way Studio Ghibli approaches grief?

Karl Thomas Smith: The honest answer is that they just don’t fuck about.

What makes this approach unique from other animation houses, particularly when it comes to young audiences?

Karl Thomas Smith: The default setting is to assume that when something is for kids – or when something is also for kids, in the case of most of Studio Ghibli’s movies – that the sharp corners need to be sanded down. Everything should be smooth. Death shouldn’t be the end, and grief shouldn’t come into it. That loss, however it appears, should be balanced out by something gained. Ghibli films don’t really fall into that trap: they show us that some things, once gone, are gone forever, and they show us just how much that absence might hurt. It isn’t neat, it isn’t tidy, and it certainly isn’t painless. I don’t think kids need to be sat down and made to watch, like, Requiem for a Dream or Antichrist, but they don’t necessarily need to have these harsh and brutal truths kept from them either. Rather, they could be shown to them in a way that’s altogether more tender. Which, to be honest, applies to all of us as much as it does to kids.

How did you come to find comfort in Studio Ghibli when dealing with your own grief? And what comfort did you find?

Karl Thomas Smith: Comfort is an interesting word. I feel like when you comfort someone, you’re telling them that everything is going to be okay, even when it isn’t. It’s a kind of appeasement, really. Which isn’t always the best thing in the end. What I get from these films is something more practical: ways of thinking, processing, and coming to terms – through the magic, fantasy, and myth – with the reality of what’s happening. Grave of the Fireflies is a great example of what can happen if you languish too long in denial, fantasy, or mythologising your grief – how it can take root and become your world, even as the world around you falls apart, totally unaware until it’s too late.

These movies are a mirror. Like all good stories, they show you something of yourself. And, in terms of my own experience, it’s just that. Grave in particular helped me pick apart some of the knots I’d gotten myself in over the years. It helped me pull apart the fragments of memory that I’d pieced together – to see those places where I’d jammed their sharp edges into one another and didn’t really care if they fit at all, only that they weren’t exposed or dangerous anymore  – and think more about how that picture is supposed to look. Ghibli films are puzzles, mazes in a way: sometimes the characters find their way out or put the pieces together in the right order, and sometimes they don’t. But you follow their mistakes, their hopelessly and hopeful train of magical thinking, and you get help with your own puzzle. It’s not a fix – certainly not a quick fix anyway – but it helps.

There’s not necessarily comfort in that, but there is a kind of peace – even in just accepting that you’re trapped in the first place.

Did you discover anything new or unexpected about Studio Ghibli films while writing?

Karl Thomas Smith: Not anything within the movies that I’d missed, per se, but certainly things about them in between the layers – certain narrative forms and tropes. This mostly jumped out when I was thinking about myth as a kind of coping mechanism, or mechanism for understanding. There’s a quote from Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, where she writes, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’. I got to thinking from there about how myths are just ways of explaining things that we don’t have adequate words for – things like grief. So I started mapping some of the ancient myths onto Ghibli movies – matching Persephone with Chihiro in Spirited Away, Ponyo with Orpheus and Eurydice, Laputa: Castle in the Sky with Prometheus – not because these narratives have been borrowed or lifted, but because they are universal, timeless stories of grief, loss, and failure, and of the small good that can sometimes come from those things. Fantasy is just a way of dealing with reality.

Which moment from any Studio Ghibli film stands out to you the most and why?

Karl Thomas Smith: Of all the Ghibli movies, Spirited Away probably occupies the most space in my dumb little heart. There’s so much love, hurt, kindness, and honesty, it can be totally unbearable. It’ll always be the one-two punch of No-Face’s battering by the waves – so iconic it has made its way to memedom – and the train ride. It’s so beautifully executed and so wonderfully rendered in terms of the art, music, and dialogue – or the lack of dialogue. So utterly devastating and hopeful. It’s hard to think of a better representation of just how futile it is to fight the inevitable, or of the beauty that comes with acceptance. I think about it all the time.

What has the process of writing the book taught you about grief? Any lessons you can share?

Karl Thomas Smith: The lesson, for me at least, is don’t be stupid. Don’t fool yourself. Nobody wants grief to rear its head and charge into their life, but it will. You can’t stop it. You can’t fight it, and you shouldn’t – the harder you struggle, the worse it gets. The longer you spend convincing yourself that it’s out of your life for good, the harder it hits when, inevitably, it comes knocking once again. It seems counterintuitive, but open the door. It’s not going to go away – it’s going to be standing there, banging away, until it breaks its way in. Things will be a whole lot easier if you offer up an invitation; a welcome, even. But, fucking hell, that’s a lot easier said than done.

Now Go: On Studio Ghibli and Grief is out now via 404 Ink

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