When the free Palestine movement gained momentum in Europe, I wasn’t able to identify with it. I didn’t take part in their demonstrations, and I didn’t discuss it much back then, but now that the topic is relevant to what’s happening in Iran, I think I should. It’s not that I didn’t support the movement’s moral cause. Of course what happened in Gaza was a dark chapter in recent history. But it bothered me that most of the leftist westerners didn’t understand the nuances of what was happening. Like many other matters in modern history, the Israeli Palestinian conflict was oversimplified and flattened into a caricature of the situation. It had little to do with the perspective I had based on my own lived experience.

Which is why I thought Hamas’s extremist ideology and its ties to Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic regime should be recognized, and its share in flaring up the conflict acknowledged. However, many weren’t able to understand the necessity of this emphasis. I don’t want to get into a long discussion about the conflict. It’s a complex historical issue and I’m sure my pro-Palestine friends have some solid points to make about it. But it is not a fringe claim to say that Hamas sits in a regional web of patronage and strategic alignment. For one thing, Iranian officials publicly praised the Hamas-led assault of October 7, 2023, framing it as a triumph and a turning point. That attack, in turn, became the immediate trigger Israel’s government invoked to launch the Gaza campaign that followed, leaving a historic trail of bloodshed.

Iran’s Protests

And then Iran erupted again. On December 28, 2025, nationwide protests began, triggered by economic grievances but instantly shifting into an anti-establishment uprising. We’ve had many such eruptions in our recent history, and each time they felt like a long-suppressed scream finally finding its lungs. The regime’s response followed a pattern Iranians know too well; a crackdown that is both blunt and methodical, though this time unprecedented in intensity and scale, and amid a total internet blackout that still continues as I write these words. The true scale of the regime’s violence has remained, and perhaps will remain, unknown. As the blackout chokes verification, death-toll estimates diverge: HRANA rights group has reported at least 2,571 killed as of January 14, 2026, while the London-based opposition channel Iran International has estimated figures as high as 12,000.

If you want a single image of what that “darkness” contains, consider what doctors and nurses reportedly witnessed in Tehran: over 400 gunshot-related eye injuries treated in one hospital, with wounds clustered around heads and eyes, suggesting not just violence, but a tactic of permanent maiming. Or consider the theatre of intimidation that has accompanied so many Iranian uprisings since 1979. Activists say Iranian state media aired at least 97 coerced “confessions” in the first two weeks of protests, presented with the familiar mix of humiliation and warning, with credible allegations that such confessions are extracted under torture or severe pressure. The UN human-rights office has warned that hundreds of protesters have been killed, with the High Commissioner describing horror at the brutality used to suppress demonstrations.

Foreirgn Agents

Against that backdrop, the old reflexes returned too. The regime framed protesters as foreign-guided “terrorist operatives,” and officials leaned on the familiar story that real Iranian grievance is never real; it is always imported, financed, scripted somewhere else. Many observers outside Iran, even those who should know better, fall into a mirror-image of that same trap. Before asking what people want, they ask who is “behind” them. And this is where my earlier discomfort returns. It’s not a petty cultural complaint about Western activism, but a moral problem with consequences.

Because what recently happened in Iran, and the Free Palestine collectives’ silence about it, just showed that the movement was at best west-centric. Their cause is less about the right moral stance concerning humanitarian concerns than it was about the western youth’s search for an identity: a generation dealing with a collective guilt over a dark colonial past. “Colonialism” is a moral keyword for the leftist activists, whose lexicon is often enriched by the academic jargon. Colonial theories were, and still are, important in creating revisionist perspectives of the Western history. Certainly, this brought about salient social awareness, too. But in contemporary activism, it has given rise to a snubbish moral identity. A myopic elitism that fails to understand the geo- and sociopolitical complexities of the distant geographies it is trying to save.

To be clear: I’m not claiming every pro-Palestine activist was silent, nor pretending there weren’t exceptions. I’m pointing to a pattern that even sympathetic commentators have noticed and tried to explain. In a recent New Yorker Q&A about Iran’s protests, the interviewee suggests that some activists keep quiet because they fear weakening the Islamic Republic would worsen Palestine’s situation. This is an argument that, to an Iranian ear, sounds like letting a house burn to preserve a slogan painted on its wall. The New Republic, writing from a very different political position than mine, makes another related observation, that some voices on the left defame Iranian resistance as serving the ends of imperialism, as if the only political agency permitted to Iranians is the agency to be pawns.

This is the deeper hypocrisy. These voices center the West even while denouncing it. They treat non-Western people as furniture in a Western moral drama, or as props that must behave correctly in order to remain worthy of solidarity. Once you see this, you start noticing the vocabulary games. Words like “imperialism” become less like analytical tools and more like shibboleths. Say the right incantation, and you belong. Fail to do that and you are suspect, possibly even an agent.

The Left’s Moral Dilemma

And this is precisely what makes Iran such a test of integrity for contemporary leftism. Iran is not a clean parable. It is a moral quagmire. It does not allow you to keep your hands pure by choosing a single villain and chanting a single word. It forces you to hold two ideas at once. That Palestinians deserve dignity and safety; and that the Islamic Republic, through its ideology, its regional adventurism, and its machinery of repression, has devastated millions of Iranians, especially women, since 1979.

Traumas, struggles and the prolonged, agonizing life world of the people living under the Iranian regime is not understood by many of the leftist activists, who might have, openly or in secret, felt that justice was served when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) showered Israeli cities with missiles. Finally, they might have thought, someone’s out there stopping the Zionists, who have done all they can as the international community looks the other way.

Yet for Iranians this sense of helplessness, albeit toward the Iranian regime, has been tied to their lived experience. Millions of women in Iran have been suppressed by the religious ruling class since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Millions of Iranians feel their demands for freedom, democracy, economic stability and a peaceful foreign policy have been met by force. Many have been killed, imprisoned, tortured and harassed by the Islamic Republic. Any Iranians would have multiple stories about micro traumas they’ve carried with them because of being bullied, harassed or insulted at some point in their lives.

And ironically, such an injustice was caused by the same ideology that seeks justice against Zionism and imperialism. This is why slogans alone won’t do. The “anti-imperialism” that cannot see Iranian women as anything other than collateral to a regional chessboard becomes, in effect, an anti-imperialism of convenience. It can end up excusing reactionary power so long as it positions itself against the West. Scholars and critics have long warned about “the anti-imperialism of fools”: an anti-imperialism so obsessed with opposing the West that it ends up politically siding with reactionary forces like the theocratic rulers in Iran.

The Netflix adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude has brought renewed attention to a novel that has enchanted and puzzled readers for over half a century. With its phantasmagoria of vividly imagined tales, the book — set in Colombia, the birthplace of its author — remains one of literature’s most audacious and enduring creations. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet and essayist, once called it “a book as profound as the cosmos and capable of endless interpretations.” It is a story that operates on many levels at once: an allegory of human history and nature, a commentary on Latin American politics, and a meditation on memory, time, and destiny.

I first read the novel in my early twenties, and Borges’s words immediately resonated. I was captivated by the limitless wanderings of Márquez’s imagination, where the supernatural lives comfortably alongside the everyday lives of those who found, inhabit, and transform the mythical town of Macondo. I was struck by the variety and vitality of characters: each one born and dying (often mythically), each one bound by solitude, consumed by esoteric quests, violence, and incest, and trapped by the invisible hands of fate. It remains one of the most powerful novels I’ve ever read.

Now, years later, the Netflix adaptation has rekindled that fascination. With its rich cinematography and poetic pacing, the series uses the language of images to evoke the novel’s cosmic sweep and human intimacy, while also capturing the episodes that mirror the sociopolitical history of Colombia and Latin America. Watching it reminded me of everything that made the novel so magnetic, and compelled me to look past my initial enchantment and explore its deeper themes. What follows is an attempt to interpret the story’s many layers: historical, existential, and philosophical.

Founding Macondo

“José Arcadio Buendía dreamed that night that right there a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. On the following day he convinced his men that they would never find the sea. He ordered them to cut down the trees to make a clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot on the bank, and there they founded the village.”
 — One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

The ghost of Prudencio Aguilar appears in the house of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán. Ever since José Arcadio killed Prudencio in a duel of honor, the man’s spirit begins to haunt their home — wandering, silent, looking for water to wash his wounds. Unable to live with the presence of the dead man and his mournful longing for the living, the couple decides to leave. Along with their friends, they embark on an expedition to find the sea. The journey, however, ends in a clearing beside a river. It is there that they found Macondo.

Although the search for an escape from violence and guilt ends in that riverbank, José Arcadio Buendía’s curiosity does not. As the novel says, “his unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic.” He becomes obsessed with esoteric studies such as alchemy, astronomy, and the mysteries of the universe. At one point, he roams Macondo with a camera, hoping to accidentally capture a photograph of God. Failing that, and confronted by the weight of time, memory, and mortality, he descends into a state of perpetual delirium. Twenty men finally tie him to a chestnut tree in the courtyard. He lives out the rest of his life there, in solitude, speaking in tongues and visited by ghosts of the dead. Afflicted by their own forms of existential solitude, each member of the Buendía family embarks on a solitary search — as if doomed to repeat the same longing.

Macondo becomes a stage on which life journeys magically intertwine with the history of a people. Gabo, as Márquez’s friends affectionately called him, described Cien años de soledad as “no more than an attempt to write a 450-page vallenato,” referring to the folk ballads of the Caribbean. These ballads, much like Márquez’s prose, wove together the emotions of townspeople, their daily lives, and historical events into sweeping, musical narratives that blend reality with imagination.

In much the same way, Márquez orchestrates his own vallenato in prose, creating a foundational work of what came to be known as magical realism. In Márquez’s hands, borders between myth and history dissolve, time folds in on itself, insomnia becomes a plague of forgetting, and yellow flowers rain upon the town. The plot does not unfold linearly; it circles, spirals, and stutters. The same names return like echoes trapped in a canyon: José Arcadios, Aurelianos, and Úrsulas, looping endlessly through a family line seemingly cursed to repeat itself. And all of this unfolds against the backdrop of Colombia’s colonial transformation: an Eden-like genesis unraveling into a series of futile civil wars, fought and lost by Colonel Aureliano Buendía.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a century-long saga condensed into 450 pages. Had it been written by Tolstoy, it might have stretched across volumes. But with lyrical brevity, Márquez loops through time, slipping effortlessly between memories and moments in the personal and historical life of the Buendía family. Literary critic Harold Bloom once wrote that his first impression upon reading the book was one of “aesthetic battle fatigue,” as every page bursts with so much life that it overwhelms the reader’s capacity to absorb it all. The novel is therefore a dazzling yet demanding work of literature. It is a book that Márquez himself once described as impossible to film.

From Page to Screen: The Netflix Adaptation

Yet the One Hundred Years of Solitude Netflix series has managed to capture, at least to a great extent, not only the novel’s magical realist narrative style, but also its musical rhythm and poetic undertone. Released in December 2024, the first season — comprising eight episodes — has received both critical acclaim and widespread popular attention, all while remaining remarkably faithful to the spirit of the original text. It has been praised by critics as “a big, gorgeous adaptation” and “one of the most faithful page-to-screen adaptations in recent years”, holding an 83% critic score and a 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The second season, which will complete the 16-episode arc, is expected by early 2026.

The series has been particularly well received in Colombia, ranking among the country’s top three most-watched non-English Netflix productions, with over 3.6 million views in its first week. This reception was especially meaningful, as the production team had to reckon with the towering cultural legacy of the writer — whose face appears on Colombian currency, and whose novel has been required reading for generations of schoolchildren.

The challenge wasn’t merely one of production design or visual fidelity; it was about embodying the novel’s form, content, and philosophy in a way that would resonate with its most intimate audience: Colombian viewers. For many, One Hundred Years of Solitude is not just a novel, but a cultural heirloom. It is as deeply rooted in the national psyche as José Arcadio Buendía is to the tree in his final years. To adapt it at all felt, to some, almost sacrilegious.

Much like the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, the weight of expectation — the perfectionism born of reverence — hovered over the 900-strong production team and never quite left. The series became a prolonged and ambitious undertaking, six years in the making, and reportedly the most expensive television production in Latin American history. To bring the fictional Macondo to life, Netflix constructed four separate sets, transported native trees from the Caribbean coast, and collaborated with over 150 local communities to craft thousands of handmade artifacts. The result not only brought global attention to Colombia’s diverse landscapes and creative talent, but it also delivered a boost to the local creative economy. According to Netflix, the production contributed over 225 billion Colombian pesos (more than $53 million) to the country’s GDP.

All of this was made possible through close collaboration with Márquez’s family, who, in accordance with his wishes before his death in 2014, ensured that the series was filmed entirely in Colombia and in Spanish. The majority of the production team — like the cast — was Colombian, grounding the series not only in place but in identity.

A Genesis for Colonized Lands

The emphasis on preserving the Colombian identity of the Netflix series shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been called “the defining saga of Latin America’s social and political history.” Márquez filters real historical events through a mythic language, creating what has been described as a South American Genesis. Through the rise and fall of Macondo, the novel explores the colonial legacy, civil conflict, imperialism, and cultural identity of Latin America.

At first, Macondo exists in mythic seclusion: a village so young that “things lacked names,” where life unfolds in a kind of timeless simplicity. Into this Edenic world arrive the gypsies, the first messengers of change. Their annual visits bring wondrous novelties — magnets, ice, telescopes — which the villagers perceive as magical. Though shrouded in superstition, the gypsies are in fact carriers of scientific knowledge.

This ironic reversal — modern science disguised as magic — sets the tone for Macondo’s early encounter with modernity. At first, these novelties are absorbed into daily life without disrupting its essential rhythm. José Arcadio Buendía becomes obsessed with discovery, chasing the promises of progress, while Úrsula quietly keeps the family grounded. Márquez evokes this phase almost nostalgically: a golden age before the arrival of more corrosive forces, when Macondo remained unified and unaware of the world beyond.

But the town’s seeming isolation is a double-edged sword. Free from colonial oversight, yes — but also naïve to the histories and power structures already in place. When José Arcadio Buendía stumbles upon a Spanish galleon stranded deep inland, the image feels absurd, yet deeply symbolic. This colonial relic, displaced and forgotten, reminds us that history’s debris still lingers, even where people imagine they are beginning anew.

Soon after, the illusion of independence begins to crack. Don Apolinar Moscote, a government official, arrives in Macondo to impose the authority of the distant state, ordering homes to be painted blue to reflect Conservative allegiance. This marks the first intrusion of the nation-state into Macondo’s self-governing world. Though initially resisted, the conflict is resolved through marriage and political compromise, foreshadowing the larger invasions yet to come.

One of the devastating of these ruptures comes with the outbreak of civil war. Marquez weaves into the novel the violent echoes of Colombia’s own history, particularly the brutal clashes between Liberals and Conservatives that plagued the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chief among them was the Thousand Days’ War (1899–1902), a conflict that left the country deeply scarred. Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s long campaign — one that transforms him from an idealist into a hardened, emotionally desolate figure — is a meditation on the futility of war and the slow erosion of revolutionary purpose.

The novel also reflects a subtle critique of imperialism through its depiction of the banana industry. Grown by local laborers under the command of a foreign corporation, writes scholar Ericka Beckman, the banana becomes more than a fruit; it becomes a symbol of external economic control and exploitation. The fictional company, an allusion to the United Fruit Company that operated along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, transforms Macondo into a site of rapid economic expansion. Even the town’s name echoes this history, drawn from a defunct banana plantation near Márquez’s birthplace. As the banana trade flourishes, it sets in motion a series of changes — social, political, and ecological — that will profoundly reshape the fabric of Macondo.

These events, which will unfold in the forthcoming second season of the series, point to a darker chapter in the town’s evolution, where the costs of progress become painfully clear. The result is fragmentation and destruction. It is a narrative arc that echoes the historical fate of many Latin American communities under the pressure of colonial inheritance and neo-colonial capitalism.

In his 1982 Nobel Prize speech, titled “The Solitude of Latin America,” Márquez argued that outsiders had failed to understand the region’s reality and myth. The novel dramatizes that solitude. As Nii Ayikwei Parkes, an award winning British writer born of Ghanaian descent noted, the novel “taught the west how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-western writers.” Macondo becomes a metaphor for a Latin America misunderstood, exploited, and forgotten — yet still shimmering with fabulous storytelling.

Solitude, Memory and Meaning

It is the same magical and symbolic storytelling that elevates One Hundred Years of Solitude from a family chronicle to a myth of universal resonance. The author himself has said that the ideal novel should “perturb not only because of its political and social content, but also because of its power of penetrating reality; and better yet, because of its capacity to turn reality upside down so we can see the other side of it.” Readers around the world find themselves captivated by the novel’s profound concern with this universal view of human reality: by solitude, the circular nature of time, the fragility of memory, and the endless search for meaning.

The very title announces solitude as the novel’s central condition: nearly every Buendía is afflicted by some form of isolation, alienation, or obsessive inner struggle. Through these characters, Márquez reveals how personal ambition, inherited trauma, and existential longing can turn solitude into a curse — one passed down through generations like a spell no one can break.

Yet, in their longings these generations swing between memory and oblivion. In fact the story starts with a memory — that of Colonel Aureliano Buendia as he faces the firing squad — making memory a central theme. Úrsula, the family matriarch who outlives many generations, occasionally reminds her sons of their past. She sees what happens to her son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, when the past dries up in him. As the novel goes: “He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia. ‘Good Lord,’ Úrsula said to herself. ‘Now he looks like a man capable of anything.’ He was.”

Time and destiny are other central themes. Time is portrayed not as linear or progressive but as cyclical, unstable, and recursive. The same names recur, fates echo one another, and events come full circle. Úrsula becomes acutely aware of this tenacious repetition of traits and destinies: “While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign.” She tries to resist the pull of fate by banning the reuse of names, though her efforts fail. These and other allusions to destiny establish it as a central theme, explored both as a personal philosophical dilemma and as the historical destiny of a people.

The story’s circular narrative style keeps revisiting events, names, and places. This sense of déjà vu gives the novel a metaphysical weight, as if the Buendías are trapped in a story already written. Márquez literalizes this through the prophecies of Melquíades, the gypsy who leaves behind parchments so mysterious that generations of Buendías fail to decipher them — until it is too late.

In the novel’s ending something rare happens: the writer, the characters, and the reader become one, held together in a moment of reflective silence that is also the story’s end. “Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude,” the novel’s famous final line concludes, “do not have a second chance on earth.” But literature does. It carries memory forward.

The story’s sheer vitality, its excess of life, is Márquez’s counterweight to fatalism. If solitude is inevitable, then memory, imagination, and storytelling are the forces that resist it. Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude is to revel in the absurdity and ecstasy of life. One could say that Márquez’s novel, like Melquíades’ manuscript, tries to be “the memory of the universe.” The parchments capture not only grand events, but the “dust floating in the houses, the idle afternoons, the blood coursing in veins, the smallest fragments of time.”

This literary richness is perhaps what the series might struggle to fully convey — what Ariel Dorfman, a friend of Gabo, called “a feat of language.” Dorfman writes: “Like all truly revolutionary works of art, it contained, from its first iconic line, a singular strategy for conveying the world being deployed, one that would change the course of world literature.”

Like the Buendias deciphering Melquíades’ parchments, readers may be tempted to ask what the novel “means.” But One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a prophecy, a poem, a ghost story — an old man whispering the same tale again and again until the names blur, and the ache is all that lingers. In the end, only the telling remains.

Perhaps, like his master William Faulkner — who was himself echoing a literary lineage of fatalism and narrative play — Márquez knew all along that life is “a tale told by an idiot.” Alongside the despair, Márquez gives us the enchantment of the telling. In the spinning loops of memory and time, in the laughter of ghosts and the weight of forgotten names, he offers not certainty, but wonder. The meaning, if there is any, may not lie in what the story explains, but in how it haunts us — how it blooms, collapses, and returns again, like Macondo itself, suspended somewhere between oblivion and eternity.

OpenAI’s recent update of GPT-4o with a native image generator, instantly launched a viral trend: transforming political images, memes, and family portraits into dreamy, anime-style visuals inspired by the legendary Japanese animation studio, Studio Ghibli. This phenomenon, dubbed “Ghiblification,” rapidly gained traction, leading to unprecedented demand and temporary service delays.

With over 130 million users generating 700 million images in a week, the trend’s aesthetic charm is undeniable — ushering in a new chapter in AI-generated visual mimicry. But it also raises ethical questions: about copyright, automation, and the need for a deeper awareness of technology and its creators, as long advocated by Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. The mass AI replication of Ghibli’s handcrafted style seems to contradict the very philosophy of Miyazaki, who has long criticized digital technology and the dehumanizing forces of industrial capitalism.

Yet this is not a simple case of AI violating Ghibli’s spirit. It reflects a deeper, messier ethical truth — one where humans and technology are entangled in ways even Miyazaki himself could never fully escape.

Ghibli’s Way of the Samurai

Think of this scenario: in a symbolic act of protest, a Japanese anime-maker hands a samurai sword to a greedy Hollywood producer. It sounds like a satirically exaggerated manga, but Studio Ghibli did just that during the American release of its legendary work Princess Mononoke.

The greedy Hollywood producer was Harvey Weinstein, the then director of the Disney subsidiary Miramax. Princess Mononoke was a record-breaking sensation in Japan, and Weinstein wanted to release it in the U.S. after drastic cuts for length and audience appeal. In a meeting, the studio’s producer Toshio Suzuki presented Weinstein with an exact replica of a Japanese samurai sword. Then, stunning the Miramax conference room, he declared in a loud voice: “Mononoke Hime, no cuts!”

Princess Mononoke is an epic historical fantasy set in a mythical version of medieval Japan, where humans and nature are locked in a violent, morally complex struggle. Indeed, Studio Ghibli co-founders had to stand their ground against the commercial demands of the American film industry, especially since the film, like much of Miyazaki’s life and work, was a reflection of frustration with such wrong turns in the path of humanity — technological progress serving greedy consumer capitalism, environmental degradation, and human catastrophes like war and disease. Miyazaki’s work is also a reflection on humanity’s role in this trajectory — whether as a force possessing moral awareness and conscious control, as in Howl’s Moving Castle, or as passive animals ruminating endlessly under the curse of modernity, as depicted in Spirited Away.

Technology in Miyazaki’s Philosophy

Princess Mononoke emerged from a turning point in Miyazaki’s political worldview in the early 1990s — a period marked by both global and domestic upheaval. The collapse of the Soviet Union had ignited ethnic conflicts across Europe, while Japan was grappling with the aftermath of its burst economic bubble, entering a prolonged recession. The decade also brought national trauma: the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which claimed over 6,000 lives, and the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. These events formed the backdrop against which Miyazaki’s work took a darker, more politically reflective turn.

But Miyazaki had already lived through a similar clash. Growing up in postwar Japan, he saw both the rapid rise of industrial change and the lasting scars of war, set against the fading backdrop of traditional life. He has recalled how, as a child, he loved sketching tanks and warships — modern machines that symbolized power to a shy young boy. That fascination was partly shaped by his upbringing; his father ran a company that manufactured parts for fighter planes. Over time, however, Miyazaki’s early awe of technology gave way to a deeper concern for its human consequences.

He once described humanity’s technological aspirations as “beautiful yet cursed dreams,” suggesting that those who pursue them are bound to become tools of the industrial age. In his memoir Starting Point: 1979–1996, he writes: “In modern society, humans have become slaves to machines — so much so that machines currently hold the keys to our collective fate,” calling for greater emphasis in anime on the role of human agency in the creation of machines.

Miyazaki, AI and Ghiblification

Miyazaki tried to maintain the human touch in his method of filmmaking too. His attitude was not born of technophobia per se, but of a belief that art should retain a certain soul and authenticity. In a 2009 interview, when asked if he would continue animating by hand, he replied with a now-famous metaphor: “There are so many ships in the animation sea that are computer-driven, that I think we can have at least one that’s just a log raft that we can row by hand.” Studio Ghibli became that log raft — a lone holdout for traditional 2D hand-drawn animation in an ocean of 3D blockbusters.

Miyazaki always ensured technology remained a servant to artistry, not the other way around. This principle came into sharp relief in the mid-2010s, when Miyazaki was confronted with the cutting edge of animation tech — artificial intelligence. In a notorious meeting captured on film, young engineers showed him a demo of AI-generated animation featuring a disturbing, zombie-like creature contorting its body. Miyazaki’s reaction was one of visceral horror. Recalling a disabled friend who struggled even to high-five him, Miyazaki pointed to the lifeless depiction of a distorted human body. “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is,” he told the presenters. An awkward silence fell before he drove the point home: “I am utterly disgusted… I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” For Miyazaki, the grotesque, lifeless AI animation was more than just a tech experiment — it was a profound violation of the respect for living beings that he believes should underlie art. He flatly rejected any notion of incorporating such technology into his work, suggesting that if this is the future of animation, “I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

That stark encounter does indeed illustrate Miyazaki’s unwavering stance: animation, in his view, must be grounded in life, nature, and human empathy — all things he fears are lost when creators rely on algorithms and digital shortcuts.

Beyond philosophical concerns, Ghiblification has also sparked debate over copyright and artistic integrity. Using AI to mimic Ghibli’s signature style skirts dangerously close to infringement — especially when the generated works are shared widely without attribution or compensation. The ethical discomfort lies not just in the imitation of style, but in a deeper question: who owns the soul of an artwork — the studio that made it, the algorithm that mimics it, or the culture that consumes it? And maybe the real discomfort lies not in ownership, but in loss: not just who owns the soul of an artwork, but who is allowing the humanity to slip away.

Ghibli’s Moral Complexity

The loss of the human soul is a central theme in Miyazaki’s films, where humanity — once organically connected to nature — finds itself in conflict with the forces of industry, technology, and unchecked progress.

Yet in the face of these ethical uncertainties, his characters embody a deep ambivalence. His films don’t divide the world neatly into good nature and bad humans. Instead, they explore the messy, complicated space where industry and ecology collide — where rationality slowly erodes a more ancient, intuitive kind of human magic.

Take Princess Mononoke, which explores the destructive impact of human expansion and industrial capitalism on nature. It depicts how Iron Town, representing industry, seeks to destroy the forest and its spirit — reflecting a Shinto belief that nature is alive with gods, spirits, and sacred forces. Yet in the story, no one is purely good or evil. Lady Eboshi, the pragmatic yet compassionate leader of Iron Town, champions human progress. She is portrayed as someone with good intentions — caring for lepers and empowering former prostitutes. San, or Princess Mononoke, is a fierce human girl raised by wolves. She fights alongside the forest creatures against Lady Eboshi. Despite her nobility and deep connection to nature, she is driven by rage. Caught in the middle is Ashitaka, a young prince cursed by a demon while defending his village. He seeks peace and understanding between the two sides but becomes entangled in the moral complexity of the conflict.

Perhaps Miyazaki himself was caught somewhere in between the transforming forces of human progress. Although his description of the AI-generated animation experiment as “an insult to life itself” has been widely interpreted as a firm rejection of technology in animation, but he did cautiously adopt new tools when they could serve his artistic vision. In fact, Princess Mononoke marks Studio Ghibli’s first use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) — for instance, to create a sense of three-dimensionality in the scenes where Ashitaka shoots arrows at the demon spirit. But even then, the process always began with an artist’s pencil. And perhaps most crucially, Ghibli ensured that characters were never rendered entirely by computer — a deliberate choice to preserve their human presence. For Miyazaki, doing things the old way, though labor-intensive, gave his films a warmth and emotional depth that machines could not replicate.

Studio Ghibli remained a guardian of the magic that Miyazaki felt slipping away from Japan as he grew up. When figures like Harvey Weinstein attempted to manipulate his work, Studio Ghibli pushed back like a samurai. Miyazaki’s message is rooted in an acute awareness of the human spirit — its ability to both nurture and restrain the destructive forces of industrial capitalism. Today, as we live in an era marked by environmental crises and dominated by giant technology companies and industry moguls shaping the future of AI, Miyazaki’s perspective feels more vital than ever. Iron Town keeps expanding — and perhaps it’s time we start paying attention.