The first time I watched Spirited Away, I didn’t understand half of what I was feeling. I just knew I was moved. Something about the train scene. The quiet. The way Chihiro sat next to No Face, both of them looking out the window, not saying a word. The landscape outside was still. Water everywhere. No chaos. No music pushing a mood. Just presence.

Years later, I realised that moment had said more about grief, transition, and loneliness than most monologues ever could. It wasn’t trying to explain itself. It was just happening. That’s something Studio Ghibli understands intimately, that the heaviest things don’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes they pass like a breeze. And you feel it long after it’s gone.

Across the Ghibli universe, there is no screaming about trauma. There’s only wind, water, fire, silence. Grief doesn’t stand center stage. It lingers at the edge of the frame. War isn’t dramatised, but its shadows are everywhere; in the poisoned forests of Princess Mononoke, in the ruins of Howl’s Moving Castle, in the unbearable stillness of Grave of the Fireflies. These aren’t war films in the traditional sense, but they are stories shaped by it. They show its aftermath, its memory, its emotional leftovers.

Hayao Miyazaki has said he doesn’t believe in villains. That alone explains so much. Ghibli stories don’t divide the world into good and evil. Even when there’s violence, it’s never simplified. There’s always history behind it, or sorrow, or a longing that couldn’t find another shape. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the insects are terrifying but not wrong. The humans are desperate but not all cruel. There’s just too much pain and not enough time to undo it.

I keep thinking about how these films give space to contradiction. How a single scene can be both beautiful and unbearably sad. A girl flying on a glider. A curse in her blood. A world that doesn’t know how to heal. The magic lies in restraint. In trusting the audience to feel what isn’t said. And maybe that’s why these stories stay with us. Because they don’t try to shock us or explain everything. They just show us life, with all its strange softness and ache. The act of eating becomes sacred. The act of breathing, of sitting in stillness, of watching dust float in a beam of sunlight. These are not filler scenes. They’re the point.

In Ghibli, nothing is wasted. Not a glance, not a gust of wind, not a half-second of hesitation before a character speaks. Everything means something, but it never tells you what.

There’s a kind of gentle discipline in that. A refusal to make it easy. And maybe that’s what makes it all feel so real, the way real life does, when you’re sitting alone, remembering something you can’t quite put into words.

Watching these films now, as an adult, I realise they were never really for children. Or maybe they were, but only because children notice the quiet things. The sounds of footsteps on wooden floors. The way a mother’s voice changes when she’s scared. The heaviness in a sigh. These films ask us to notice too. To pay attention. To feel, without needing to define.

There’s a scene in My Neighbour Totoro where the girls wait at a bus stop in the rain. Nothing major happens. Totoro shows up. They share an umbrella. The bus arrives. That’s it. But somehow, it’s one of the most memorable scenes in animation. Not because of what’s happening, but because of how it’s held. Gently. Patiently. Like a secret you’re trusted with.

That’s what Studio Ghibli gives us, stories that trust us. That doesn’t over-explain, over-dramatise, or push. They just exist, like wind through the trees. And if we’re quiet enough, we hear everything.