Why Studio Ghibli’s Japanese Posters Feel So Different!

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Here we have the [music] Japanese poster for Ponyo, and one thing I love about this is that this movie was released in 2008 when a lot of animation studios were moving fully into digital. Ponyo is 100% hand-drawn animation, and you can tell that they really want to emphasize that in the poster. It's not the final animation. You can see visible texture, the pencil marks, the shading, everything. [music] Ponyo is only partially visible here. She's in her bucket. Sosuke, we can only see his hands and his feet. And this is really characteristic of a lot of the other Studio Ghibli posters you'll see in our gallery. More sometimes even the title character isn't [music] fully visible. I think that's something that maybe American audiences are expecting to see, as we see in the American poster. For Studio Ghibli films especially, it's really more about evoking a certain mood or tone or vibe, rather than what the movie itself is about.