Best Studio Ghibli Movies Ranked for New Fans

With Ghibli Fest bringing the studio’s catalog back to theaters this year, there has never been a better moment to work through the classics. Here is our ranking of the essentials.

The essential seven

1. Spirited Away. Still the studio’s masterpiece, a film that feels dreamed rather than written.

2. Princess Mononoke. Ghibli at its most epic and morally complicated.

3. Grave of the Fireflies. The most devastating animated film ever made. Watch it once. You will never need to watch it again.

4. My Neighbor Totoro. Pure childhood distilled into 86 minutes.

5. Howl’s Moving Castle. The most beloved comfort film in the catalog.

6. Kiki’s Delivery Service. A gentle story about burnout made decades before we had the word.

7. The Boy and the Heron. Miyazaki’s late career meditation, stranger and more personal than anything before it.

Every ranking of these films is wrong to someone, which is the surest sign of a great catalog.

My take: Totoro is the objectively correct pick for families, but Mononoke is the one I revisit most. Nothing else in animation balances awe and anger quite like it.