It’s been A week, my dear.
[This post is also available in Portuguese — here.]
If at some point in your online life you tried to make a Youtube video about one of Ghibli’s movies, and you used some images from those movies, than you most probably got a copyright strike and your video was most probably taken down.
It doesn’t matter if it was a positive review of a movie, or if you were making criticism — it all went down the same way. Ghibli is knowingly very, very protective of it’s IPs. And for those who create content about anime, animation in general or anything that has any connection with Ghibli’s body of work, this was always a bummer.
Ghibli’s work is well loved and praised all over the world, people love to watch it and analyze it – I do too. So for content creator they would be great content. But they were almost always taken down. And as frustrating as these things can be, honestly, Ghibli was right.
One of the most important themes of Miyazaki’s work, and of Ghibli as a whole, is the way fascism can infiltrate our lives and the horrors of war.
Personally, my favourite Ghibli movie is How’s Movie Castle. Yes, Howl is super hot, but my family has a very personal history with the second world war and fighting against fascism. My grand-grandfather was an anarchist, my grandfather was a socialist and both of them had to flee Spain during the Franco Regime. My grandfather was a soldier of the French Resistance, and I saw with my own eyes how the horrors of war can disrupt and influence the survivors even after decades.
Howl’s not only fighting against the invading enemy, he’s fighting his own country and it’s fascist hand that is forcing wizards to lose their humanity and become war machines in an endless war. He’s so desperate to fight this immense and overpowering engine that he is also almost losing himself. It’s a tragedy who’s happy ending can only happen in fantasy, with a kiss of true love.
In real life, AI Generated Images have become the art form of fascism. There is nothing it can’t replicate, and so it can regurgitate lying images with the same speed a fascist government can revoke rights. A right wing political party in Brazil recently made social media campaign focusing on women in politics using only AI Generated images, showing beautiful fictitious women in front of pretty fictitious ideals they say they fight for. All of it is a lie.
With the latest ChatGPT update the internet was inundated with images of Ghibli style soulless prompt-generated images. I’m pretty sure they finally fed their machine learning algorithm with all the Ghibli Studio’s library of movies, comics, TV series and games. And so you can now generate a soulless version of lord of the rings – Ghibli style. Or maybe you want to make a politician eating a snack — Ghibli style. Perhaps you want to use it as propaganda of your violent mass deportation program targeting people of colour campaign. You can do all of that now.
Miyazaki, and Ghibli, know the power of fascism and how it can infiltrate our societies and lives, selling war and violence as means to an end that is, ultimately, inhumane. I cannot sit here and tell you that back when Ghibli decided to block all use of it’s art from Youtubers they knew that, one day, AI would come and serve as the face of fascism. But even though the creators were to make money from the content they put out, a huge international corporation would make even more money from Ghibli’s art and after their run with Disney, I’m pretty sure they know not to fully trust huge corporations.
All of this to say that Ghibli was right about restricting the use of it’s IP’s because, in the end, what we call IP’s are actually the life work’s of many, many people — not only Miyazaki. And art can be used by both good and bad, history has thought us that. And when we are talking about major corporation that answer only to their shareholders interests, as we can see right now, even the most amazing and political anti-fascist art can be twisted and used to feed the fascist machinery.
Se you!
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PS: I’m well aware that Howl’s Moving Castle is an adaptation of the Diana Wynne Jones books. I also know that Miyazaki did some very big changes to the book. I started reading the first one many years ago, but never finished and, because of it, I cannot say if these themes are also in there or not. But please feel free to talk about it in the comments, if you’d like to.
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