Studio Ghibli Commercials

If you’ve got the blues about Studio Ghibli’s potential shuttering, take some small consolation knowing that a few items, however small, are bound to have slipped you by over the years. Is your Totoro Blu-ray so well-worn that the kids are begging you to finally put on something else? Is your wife tired of the excuses for buying yet another Grave of the Fireflies international poster? Did Takahata block your number? This collection of TV ads, ranging from 1992 to the current day, should give their biggest fans something new to chew on.

Many of them are brief — seconds long, even — and, yes, designed to sell something you might not wish to buy, but the level of craft and care herein, the pure dazzle of their hand-drawn aesthetic, proves strong enough to offset any potential qualms. (Being that many of the titles are listed in Japanese, one often won’t have the context of a product to cloud these efforts.) It’d certainly be better if YouTube ran these as pre-roll instead of another goddamn Geico commercial.

Below, have a look at those and three Ghibli ads for the food corporation Nisshin Seifun (both via Open Culture):

Which ad is your favorite?

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