The 30 Best Studio Ghibli Characters Ranked

Studio Ghibli, the company founded by directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and producer Toshio Suzuki, may be the greatest animation studio in history. Much of its films' successes can be attributed to great characters. The characters in Ghibli films tend to be more multi-dimensional and morally and psychologically complex than those in the films of Walt Disney Animation Studios, or the characters in most other anime for that matter. Their human characters are realistic and deeply relatable, while their more fantastic creations can be adorable, terrifying, or sometimes both.

With so many classics, not everyone's favorite is going to make this list, but we've assembled a collection of 30 outstanding Studio Ghibli characters from 17 of the studio's 23 animated features (apologies to "Pom Poko" and "My Neighbors the Yamadas," which were more ensemble pieces as opposed to developing stand-out individual characters, as well as to the more forgettable "Ocean Waves" and the three films of Goro Miyazaki). This list does not include characters from the studio's short films (most of which are only viewable at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo), nor does it include projects on which Ghibli handled outsourcing work for other studios (a list that includes the likes of "Neon Genesis Evangelion," "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence," and somehow also "Recess: School's Out").

Also appearing in two different Studio Ghibli films are the soot sprites, adorable little black balls of dust anthropomorphized with arms, legs, and big cartoony eyes. They first appear in Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 film "My Neighbor Totoro" as the first supernatural creatures Mei notices at her new house in the countryside — the exact sort of thing a young kid might imagine when entering a dusty new place. They're driven away from the house by the family's laughter, flying off to find a new place to stay.

The soot sprites return in another Hayao Miyazaki film, 2001's Academy Award-winning "Spirited Away," in which they're presented with greater personality. There, they work for the multi-armed boiler man Kamaji carrying lumps of coal much bigger than themselves into the furnace, and are fed with star-shaped candy (konpeito) as payment. Chihiro helps one particularly tired soot sprite by carrying their coal for them, which results in more soot sprites dropping their coal so that she'll do all of their work. They end up repaying her kindness by holding onto her clothes and shoes for her.

Frequently crossing paths with Hayao Miyazaki's wide-eyed young heroines are slightly older, more experienced women who have a slightly harder edge but provide wonderful mentorship and support. Lin from "Spirited Away" is a great example of this particular character archetype, showing the human girl Chihiro the ropes for working in the spirits' bathhouse and growing increasingly protective of her.

Not human but decidedly humanoid in design, many viewers might not be sure what sort of spirit Lin is supposed to be. Concept art in "The Art of Spirited Away" book confirms she's a byakko, a creature whose name is ordinarily translated as "white fox," but is specifically translated as "weasel" in the book's official translation. Lin has a bit of a "weasel-like" trickster nature to her, and she doesn't understand humans' concepts of romantic love. Lin is also an incredibly expressive character — just look at her incredible reaction (pictured above) to the Radish Spirit joining her on the elevator.

Another example of the mature mentor figure archetype a la Lin, Ursula is an artist who lives in a cabin in the woods outside of town and becomes a friend of the young witch Kiki in Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 film "Kiki's Delivery Service." Kiki inspires one of her paintings, and when Kiki is feeling so burdened with work that she can no longer do magic, it's Ursula who helps her deal with the problem by relating it to her own experiences with creative burnout.

People often associate the works of Studio Ghibli with the "cottagecore" aesthetic, and Ursula's rustic artistic life may be about as cottagecore as you can get. She's a relatively minor character in the movie (her name isn't even stated in the original Japanese version and only mentioned in passing in the English dub), but she's an extremely memorable one thanks to both her cool style and her helpful wisdom.

What makes "My Neighbor Totoro" such a truly special film is how effectively it captures the perspective of childhood. Picking our favorite human character from the film is tough — with 10-year-old Satsuki carrying the film's most dramatic moments and father Tatsuo being a paragon of supportive parenting — but it's 4-year-old Mei who is our primary guide to the magical wonders surrounding the Kusakabe family's new house.

Mei is the one who sees the soot sprites and is the first to see the Totoros — her mispronunciation of the word "troll" gives the latter creatures their name. She's fun-loving, adventurous, and takes the sort of risks that feel perfectly sensible when you're 4 years old while leaving all the older kids and adults justifiably worried. She struggles with complicated big emotions around her mother's illness in a way that feels very realistic. Mei is also the subject of a 2002 sequel short, "Mei and the Kittenbus," which only screens at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo.

One of only two characters on this list based off a real person, Jiro Horikoshi in 2013's "The Wind Rises" serves as an avatar for all of Hayao Miyazaki's darkest anxieties about his career and his art's impact on society. Jiro is a brilliant engineer who invents the Mitsubishi A6M Zero planes used by Japan's kamikaze pilots in World War II. While Jiro's portrayal in the film is heavily fictionalized (his whole romance subplot is borrowed from an unrelated novel, Tatsuo Hori's "The Wind Has Risen"), the weight of the horrors of history make "The Wind Rises" one of Miyazaki's most intense dramas.

What does it mean for a someone to want to make planes that will inevitably end up being used for weapons of war? Jiro is depicted as a portrait of otaku-like obsession (the casting of "Evangelion" director Hideaki Anno in the Japanese version is on-point for highlighting his nerdiness). All his self-justifications ultimately aren't worth anything in the end, but he still has to live with the consequences of his actions.

Hayao Miyazaki's 2004 movie "Howl's Moving Castle," very loosely adapted from Diana Wynne Jones' novel, might not have the strongest story out of all the director's works, but it does have some of his strongest characters. One of the strangest and most lovable members of the film's quirky ensemble is Calcifer, the fire demon who powers the titular moving castle.

In contrast to the more typically demonic appearance in the illustrations of the book, the Ghibli animators drew Calcifer as a stylized flame with a cute cartoony face. Just watching him in motion is a stunning display of both personality and effects animation. Calcifer is among the funniest of Ghibli's comic relief sidekicks, especially voiced by Billy Crystal in the English dub, but he also has a more serious role in the story — he's trapped inside the castle because he possesses the heart of the wizard Howl as his life force.

Lots of Studio Ghibli characters struggle with self-doubt, but how many struggle with self-loathing? Anna Sasaki directly states, "I hate myself" in the opening scene of of Hiromasa Yonebayashi's 2014 film "When Marnie Was There," the last feature film animated at Studio Ghibli before a six-year hiatus (Goro Miyazaki's TV movie "Earwig and the Witch" ended the hiatus in 2020). Anna's a biracial orphan who fears her foster parents don't actually want her, doesn't have friends, and has both asthma and serious depression. Her story is one of the most emotionally hard-hitting in the Ghibli canon.

To deal with her asthma, her doctor suggests she spend the summer in the countryside where the air is cleaner. This ends up helping her with her other problems as well, because she ends up making a deep friendship with the beautiful ghost Marnie. Anna and Marnie's connection is so intense that it's easy to read it as a romance for the majority of the film, though those hoping for Ghibli's first lesbian characters got their hopes crushed by the ending reveal that Marnie was in fact Anna's grandmother.

A personal anecdote: At Anime Boston 2022 (the first AB convention in three years), it seemed like there were a lot more people cosplaying Sophie Hatter from "Howl's Moving Castle" than usual. This could just be a coincidence, but it feels like there's something about this character that connects deeper than ever for those growing up and trying to manage expectations of adulthood in times of great uncertainty, where even our experience of time itself feels skewed.

At the start of the film, Sophie is 18 years old, but she's soon cursed by The Witch of the Waste and transformed into a 90-year-old woman. While breaking her curse is her initial driving motivation, she finds she's able to adjust to being elderly relatively comfortably and in the end is more driven by saving Howl than by becoming young again. Her age and appearance fluctuate a lot under the curse, reflecting her emotional state more than anything else. When the curse is broken in the end, she becomes young again but with silver hair, reflecting how her experiences have impacted her.

Concern for the environment is a theme, large or small, in many Studio Ghibli films, but the story of Haku in "Spirited Away" may be the studio's most poetic expression of these themes. Haku is first introduced in a humanoid form, serving Yubaba whilst secretly helping Chihiro survive in the spirit world. He warns her to never forget her real name — for he has forgotten his own. Later, we see him transformed into a dragon, but this isn't all he is, either.

It's in the movie's tearful climax, when Chihiro is riding on the dragon Haku's back to return to the bathhouse, that she remembers his true name: the Kohaku River. Chihiro once fell into this river as a younger kid, and Haku saved her back then. Now, the river has been covered up by apartments, and that's why Haku couldn't remember who he actually is. Haku is one of Hayao Miyazaki's most tragic characters and one whose complexities keep first-time viewers guessing throughout the course of the film.

Other Studio Ghibli films have been based on novels, manga, or historical events, but 2013's "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya," the final film directed by Isao Takahata, stems from the oldest and most famous source material of any Ghibli movie. Based on a Japanese folk tale first written down sometime around the 9th or 10th century, it tells the story of Kaguya, a girl born from a stalk of bamboo who grows up rapidly and is made into a noblewoman.

Kaguya is a free spirit who initially finds great joy in her time on Earth, but is crushed by the burdens of propriety, sexism, and marriage. The film's uniquely stylized animation gets the viewer directly into her mindset. The big twist: Kaguya is originally from the moon, who disobeyed the law to experience mortal life on Earth. Things get so rough that Kaguya ends up summoning others from the moon to take her back home, where she will lose all memories of her time on Earth.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: Yes, Howl Pendragon is Studio Ghibli's most attractive male character. Yes, you can make arguments for Ashitaka from "Princess Mononoke" and bear-lovers have Fukuo the baker from "Kiki's Delivery Service," but survey any group of fans about the most handsome Ghibli men (as Tokyo Otaku Mode did in 2016), and Howl inevitably comes out on top.

This isn't an irrelevant matter, because the fact Howl is pretty and he knows it is a big part of his character. He's the sort of magical drama queen who fills the room with disgusting black sludge if someone messes with his hair dye (easily one of the funniest Ghibli scenes). Is he immature and narcissistic? Absolutely, though he gets better, and also the whole "giving your heart to a demon" thing would leave anyone emotionally stunted. Despite his serious flaws, he's an easy character to fall in love with and to care about as his monstrous transformation in the war threatens to slowly destroy him.

Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 film "Princess Mononoke" is an epic about war between human industry and the forces of nature. San, also referred to as "Princess Mononoke," may be human but personifies the side of nature with all the righteous rage and violence that entails. Raised by wolves, she actively rejects her own humanity, and finds herself very confused when the human Prince Ashitaka not only wants peace between their worlds, but seems to take a genuine liking to her.

In the story's major conflicts, San's side is the more sympathetic one, but it's not necessarily something one can judge in moral terms. After all, how can one really describe the natural world itself in terms of "good" or "evil?" The film's message is ultimately about rejecting violence, with San helping Ashitaka bring peace in the end. Even so, that doesn't make the scenes of San in combat any less badass.

Jiji, Kiki's black cat from "Kiki's Delivery Service," stands out as the funniest Studio Ghibli character, though the flavor of humor depends on which language you watch the film in. As voiced by Rei Sakuma in the original Japanese version, Jiji comes off as a mix of stuck-up, anxious, and generally representing Kiki's more childish side. The English dub contains many of the same jokes as the original, but as performed by Phil Hartman (in one of his final acting roles before his tragic murder), Jiji delivers these lines in a snarkier, more sarcastic tone.

Disney's first releases of "Kiki's Delivery Service" contained even more dramatic changes. Not only were more ad-libbed lines included, but the film's ending was changed so that Kiki can understand Jiji talking again at the end of the film — an ability she seemingly loses in Japanese. Disney's 2010 rerelease and all subsequent releases from GKIDS (including the versions streaming on HBO Max in America and Netflix internationally) re-edited the dub to be more faithful to the original, cutting Jiji's final bits of dialogue (via Anime News Network).

Aside from Muska in "Castle in the Sky" and Lord Cob in the regrettable "Tales From Earthsea," Studio Ghibli doesn't really do traditional villains. Many of their films don't have a specific antagonist at all, and those that do generally make such characters morally ambiguous rather than evil. Lady Eboshi from "Princess Mononoke" is the most fascinating out of all of these antagonists, a character who could have been a hero if she wasn't also definitively in the wrong.

There are a lot of things about Eboshi which are admirable: she's a strong female leader in a patriarchal era, she's freed other women from sex slavery, she cares for lepers, she defends her village of Iron Town against invading samurai. Even her desire to mine iron from the forest for such defensive purposes is understandable, but it's also destructive, angering the gods and ruining the environment. All the sympathetic motivations in the world don't change the fact that she's the woman who shoots off the forest god's head, messing with forces of nature in ways that only destroy all that she's tried to build.

Marco Pagot, who is nicknamed "Porco Rosso" and the star of Hayao Miyazaki's 1992 film of the same name, is a hero unlike any other in the Ghibli library. He's a grown man in his late 30s, an Italian pilot traumatized by fighting in World War I, and so utterly cynical about humanity that he chose to become a pig instead. He's probably the Miyazaki protagonist most similar in personality and attitude to Miyazaki himself — if Miyazaki actually flew planes instead of just drawing them.

Over the course of his adventure in the movie, Marco's cynicism starts to crack, finding hope thanks to the young engineer Fio and realizing that his old friend Gina is in love with him. His reluctant do-gooder nature and rebellion against a fascist government ("I'd rather be a pig than a fascist," he tells a fellow pilot) are reminiscent of Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," if Rick were a pig who fought pirates. The competition is tight, but Marco may be the overall most complex and distinctive of all of Studio Ghibli's characters.