Studio Ghibli cooks and tastes every dish before drawing a single frame, Miyazaki cooks for half an hour what takes a year to animate

Hayao Miyazaki cooks and tastes every breakfast, bowl of ramen and other morsel before drawing it, producer Toshio Suzuki revealed in Susan Napier's book Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art. The habit is Studio Ghibli's answer to why the food in its films looks edible enough to reach for through the screen.

The studio took shape around the 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, based on Miyazaki's own manga; he and Isao Takahata founded Ghibli a year later with Suzuki's support. Over more than four decades it has made Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron, taking the animation Oscar in 2001 and again in 2023. In early 2026 the Princess of Asturias Foundation awarded the studio its prize for Communication and Humanities, citing a "highly imaginative artisanal process" and stories built on friendship, empathy, tolerance and respect for people and nature. The prize arrives as animation's newest tools promise finished frames from a prompt. Ghibli's frames begin in a kitchen.

The food scenes show the method. Ghibli kitchens and markets run on chiko seeds, pancetta, edamame, red bean paste, okra, seaweed, black sesame, dashi and rice; in some frames the steam rising from a pot is the signal that the pasta inside is ready. In Kiki's Delivery Service the young heroine helps an older woman bake a herring-and-pumpkin cake for her granddaughter's birthday, a nod to the old association between witches and pumpkins. In My Neighbor Totoro the eldest daughter packs a morning bentō for her father and younger sister — rice, edamame, an umeboshi plum, a shishamo fish, chopsticks and a bamboo spoon — a homemade box that bears no resemblance to the ready-made bentō sold at konbini such as 7-Eleven or Lawson.

The dishes have generated their own literature: The Recipes of Studio Ghibli Films and The Illustrated Enchanted Kitchen reconstruct the menus, and Michael Leader and Jake Cunningham's Ghibliverse follows the studio beyond the films. The books exist because the food is not decoration. Characters buy fresh produce at the market and cook in the kitchen, and the man drawing them has eaten the result first.

A dish may take Miyazaki half an hour to cook, an hour to draw, and a year to bring to life through animation.