A true institution of Japanese animation, Studio Ghibli has millions of fans around the world. But how do you pronounce the name of the Japanese studio? Guibli? Jibli? Let's see together!
Warning! To make reading easier, we have not used the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is not mastered by all of our readers. However, we have used the brackets [..] to emphasize that we are talking about phonetics.
How do you pronounce Ghibli?
Following the success of the animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), an adaptation of his own manga debuted in 1982, Hayao Miyazaki founded, alongside Isa Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, a studio that would revolutionize Japanese animated cinema. In 1986, the feature film Castle in the Sky inaugurated a long list of masterpieces, which undoubtedly contributed to popularizing Japanese animation worldwide, as much, if not more, than the great series of the 1980s/1990s, such as Knights of the Zodiac, Dragon Ball Z, Nicky Larson or even Cowboy Bebop.
Over the years, Ghibli has become the most popular Japanese studio among both the general public and critics. Although not all of its films have met with the success they deserved - one thinks in particular of the dismal failure of Isa Takahata's sublime The Tale of Princess Kaguya - the studio's instantly recognizable style appears almost as an artistic school comparable to the clear line in Franco-Belgian comics. In recent weeks, social networks have been invaded by images produced by ChatGPT imitating the Ghibli style. While it's hard to be happy about the intelligent reproduction of a graphic style that took decades to perfect, it does result from a continuing passion for the brand.
But how do you pronounce Ghibli? Some say [Guibli], others [Jibli]... Who's right, who's wrong? The answer is a little more complicated than that. For the name of the studio he co-founded, Hayao Miyazaki was inspired by a hot wind from the Libyan desert, the Ghibli - also called the Sirocco - which gave its name to an Italian aircraft developed by the Caproni company during the second half of the 1930s. Fans of the filmmaker will undoubtedly recognize two of the filmmaker's obsessions: the wind and airplanes. Moreover, it is worth remembering that the Italian aeronautical engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni was present in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Hayao Miyazaki's penultimate masterpiece. In Italian, Ghibli is pronounced [Guibli], with a hard g as in gare.
However, it seems that Hayao Miyazaki and his colleagues did not pay attention to Italian phonetics. Japanese writing uses three writing systems at the same time: ideograms - called kanji - and two syllabaries: hiragana (used for grammar and words of Japanese origin) and katakana (used for words of foreign origin). Or, スタジオジブリ is phonetically read [sutajio jibuli] (Ghibli stage). So, depending on whether you prefer the Italian pronunciation or the Japanese pronunciation, you will pronounce [guibli] or [jibli].
Did this article interest you? Then don't hesitate to discover our selection of the ten greatest geniuses of Japanese animation!
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