There is a now-famous trivia about how it took animator Eiji Yamamori one year and three months to animate a four-second scene in The Wind Rises. Such painstaking devotion to an art is almost spiritual. That is the magic of Studio Ghibli and its animations that come alive because every frame reflects the process and the humanity of its creators.
Yet, in the last two or three days, social media has been flooded with AI-generated images tagged Ghibli-style or Ghibliverse. A single prompt creates your own Ghibli-inspired image in seconds. The results are charming. The results are also a mirage that captures the surface of Studio Ghibli’s art while gutting its soul.
This forces us to confront a critical question: When technology democratises the ability to mimic art, what happens to the act of creation and the culture it sustains?
The Necessity of Process
Studio Ghibli’s animations are designed with a philosophy. It tells us that art is born from friction. When one watches a Studio Ghibli film, one imagines the number of times that the artist involved must have sketched, erased and redrawn scenes. And this comes from knowing what it takes to make that art in the first place. The forests in My Neighbor Totoro were inspired by actual field trips to Japanese woodlands.
A visit to Wales during the 1980s miners' strike inspired the mining town depicted in Castle in the Sky. The studio masterfully achieves a connection to its fantasy world by weaving in elements of realism, striking a balance between fantasy and believability. This process is meditative as the artists pour their fears, hopes and flaws into their work. It mirrors the lived experience of the creator.
There is a difference between the human journey of creation and the algorithmic efficiency of AI. A Studio Ghibli film, with its hundreds of thousands of meticulously hand-drawn frames, exhibits years of dedicated labour, the cumulative effort of many artists pouring their skill, passion and individual voices into a unified vision. Each frame is consciously informed by an understanding of movement, emotion and storytelling honed through years of observation. The imperfections contribute to the film's unique charm and the palpable sense of human touch.
An artist can spend years learning the skill set and the technicalities of their art form, but their authentic style emerges only through failure. It emerges out of the discarded storyboards, the rejected drafts, the messy painting and the out-of-tune audio. It emerges out of a quiet crisis of confidence.
The Destination Without the Journey
AI tools collapse this journey into a transaction. You enter a prompt and the machine stitches together a collage of words or pixels in an instant. The output is polished yet utterly devoid of intent. It mimics the technicalities but eviscerates the human essence.
The illusion of instant mastery is seductive. Why spend a decade honing a craft when an algorithm can replicate it in moments? But this mindset conflates art with aesthetics.
The true creation of any art is not about the creation itself. It is about the dialogue between the creator and the medium. It is informed by the choices and the journey of the creator. When AI circumvents this dialogue, it reduces art to a card trick.
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The Cost of Bypassing the Journey
The ramifications extend beyond individual artists. If we begin to value AI’s speed over human effort, we risk eroding the ecosystems that nurture diversity. Mass-produced art homogenises creativity by incentivising derivative work. Algorithms are trained on existing data, meaning they excel at what has been created in the past, but they will struggle at what can be created in the future.
As AI churns out crowd-pleasing tropes, platforms reward this content with clicks, pushing artists and studios to mimic the algorithm’s preferences. Over time, culture becomes a hall of mirrors- familiar but stagnant. AI cannot innovate. It can only iterate.
The Crisis of Authenticity
Studio Ghibli’s films are inseparable from its founder, Hayao Miyazaki’s activism, his wartime trauma, and the studio’s environmental ethos. Themes like anti-war, industrialisation and the erosion of humanity are seeped into the films in subliminal ways. Art is not only a product but a mirror of its creators’ politics.
AI severs this bond. Its ‘Ghibli-style’ images have no context, no conviction and no layers. They are hollow aesthetics, divorced from the human experiences that give art meaning.
When anyone can generate art without intent, it breeds a culture of disposability where art is consumed and forgotten as quickly as we scroll past it. What is left when technology severs art from the sweat, soul and struggle that birthed it is a thought we must ponder upon.
John Berger’s seminal work, Ways of Seeing, dissects how technological shifts like the invention of oil paint, photography, or mass printing fundamentally altered art’s role in society. Before the Renaissance, art was largely bound to religion or patronage and its meaning was fixed by its immediate context. Oil paintings in the 15th century mirrored the ambitions of the merchant class- they celebrated wealth, exhibited property and fetishised luxury.
When photography emerged in the 19th century, it democratised image-making, stripping art of its aristocratic exclusivity. Suddenly, art became common.
But this shift came at a cost. As Berger argues, mechanical reproduction, whether through prints or postcards, detached artworks from their original contexts, turning sacred Renaissance altarpieces into living room décor and reducing Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo to a dorm-room poster. The aura of the original was diluted. Art became a consumable image rather than an embodied experience. Today’s AI-generated art echoes this. Like the camera, it democratises creation, but risks reducing centuries of cultural nuance to context-free pixels.
Audience Desensitisation & Artist Identity
AI-generated art also risks rewiring our relationship with creativity itself. As algorithms churn out instantly gratifying images, audiences may grow acclimated to art that prioritises speed and flawlessness over depth and human imperfection. The slow, vulnerable process of human creation could start to feel inconvenient, even obsolete, in a culture conditioned to equate value with efficiency.
This impatience threatens to marginalise art that demands reflection, fostering a preference for the easy over the meaningful. For emerging artists, this shift exacerbates an existential tension: Is their worth defined by their unique perspective or, simply, their ability to engineer a prompt?
The pressure to feed the right prompt rather than create art risks eroding artistic identity, reducing self-expression to a game of keyword optimisation. Young creators might grapple with a crisis of authenticity, torn between honing their voice and catering to platforms that reward mimicry over originality.
Over time, this could reshape artistic education, sidelining foundational skills like storytelling and critical thinking. The danger of AI art is that it risks trading the messy journey of art for a sterile transaction between a user and the machine. In this ethos, preserving the value of patience and human intent will ultimately become a struggle.
What Art Stands For
The true power of art lies in the human journey embedded within it. Like fossils preserved through centuries, every work of art carries the imprint of its creator’s strengths and vulnerabilities. The journey of creation- marked by doubt, experimentation and triumphs- is where art transcends mere aesthetics to become a mirror of a shared humanity.
When an audience engages with art, it is not about consuming an aesthetic. They become part of the artist’s solitude, their defiance of limits and their yearning to create. AI may replicate the surface, but it cannot counterfeit the rage or the courage of human essence. These are not features that can be prompt-engineered. They are lived truths.
To reduce art to its commodified aesthetics is to erase the dialogue between creator and creation- a process that reminds us why we endure, create and persist. In preserving this journey, we safeguard the very essence of art and of what it means to be human.
(Farnaz Fatima has a postgraduate degree in Politics and International Studies. Currently working in advertising, she is interested in exploring the intersections of gender, mental health and popular culture through her writing. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)