Jessica Niebel, the curator of the Lost Angeles Academy Museum of Moving Pictures, said that she came across Isao Takahata, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli. He said, “When children in Japan see trees, they expect a Totoro is living inside of it, and that is his greatest accomplishment.” This inspired Niebel to curate an exhibition of a retrospective on Hayao Miyazaki’s most prolific works.

Niebel has approached Studio Ghibli in 2017 and has been working on this project with the studio ever since. The partnership resulted in the loan of about 300 artworks, including preparatory sketches, character sheets and finished animation cels. These artworks would later be accompanied by immersive installations, presentations and many more.

“We knew we didn’t want to just explore his work chronologically,” Niebel said. “Rather, we wanted to explore his philosophical and thematic concerns separately while also having visitors get some insight into his process.”

Among many of his critically-acclaimed works, only “Spirited Away” won an Oscar. Susan Napier, a scholar who wrote a biography of Miyazaki, confirmed that Miyazaki’s animations are indeed unusual compared to other popular animations, such as those made by Disney.

“Disney tends to be sort of binary: good or evil, black or white, and everything ends up happily ever after,” Napier said. “But in Ghibli films, there are more grays than there is black or white. There’s a lot of ambiguity—good people suffer.” She believes that an event in Miyazaki's childhood life became a driving factor for him to create stories about children who have to evolve to face injustice and moral challenges.

The retrospective is open to the public from 30 September 2021 to 5 June 2022.