Studio Ghibli Movies Tier List: All 24 Films Ranked (2026)

The Complete Studio Ghibli Tier List

Ranking Studio Ghibli films is a special kind of agony: there are no bad ones at the top, and even the "weakest" entries have devoted fans. Founded on June 15, 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, Ghibli has released 24 feature films, and choosing between Spirited Away, Totoro, and Princess Mononoke can break friendships. Here's the complete ranking, split into classic S/A/B/C/D tiers. Disagree? You should, and you can settle it yourself in minutes with Shortlist.

What Counts as a Studio Ghibli Film? (And Why Every List Gives a Different Number)

Studio Ghibli has released 24 feature films. Search for a Ghibli ranking and you will be told 21, 22, 23, 24 or 25, and the reason is not that anyone is lying: it is that almost no list states its rule. Ours is one sentence. A work is ranked here if Studio Ghibli lists it in its own catalogue at ghibli.jp and it runs to feature length. That test produces 24. Add Nausicaa and you get 25. Drop The Red Turtle and you get 23. Drop the two films that premiered on television and you get 22, or 21 without both. Every one of those numbers is defensible; only one of them is ours, and here is what it turns on.

The film it adds is The Red Turtle (2016). It is a co-production between Studio Ghibli and the French companies Wild Bunch and Why Not Productions, directed by the Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit with Isao Takahata as artistic producer. It is the only Ghibli feature not directed by a Japanese filmmaker, and the only one with no dialogue in it at all: 80 minutes of a man shipwrecked on an island, told without a spoken word. It took the Un Certain Regard Special Prize at Cannes in 2016 and an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 2017 ceremony, and it holds 93% on Rotten Tomatoes across 170 critic reviews (read 2026-08-10). Ghibli catalogues it alongside Spirited Away. Leaving it out is a choice, and a list that makes that choice silently is telling you its count is 23 without telling you why.

Two of those calls are worth defending. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is the one most people expect to see and it is genuinely not a Ghibli film: Miyazaki directed it a year before the studio was founded, and its success is what paid for the studio to exist. Ghibli has distributed it ever since, which is why it appears on the works index and why fans treat it as honorary. And Ocean Waves (1993) and Earwig and the Witch (2020) both premiered on television rather than in cinemas, but both run past 70 minutes, so a runtime rule keeps them and a cinema-release rule would not. Pick a different rule and you get a different number. State it, and the number stops being an opinion.

How to Build Your Own Studio Ghibli Tier List

You just built one, and it probably took less thought than you expected. That is the useful thing about Ghibli: placing Howl's Moving Castle against Kiki's Delivery Service in the abstract is paralyzing, but asked to pick one, your gut answers instantly.

The hardest rankings are the ones where you love everything, which is why five films is not enough here. Shortlist takes the whole catalogue the same way, one pair at a time, and gives the finished list a share link.

Read more about the comparison-based approach in our movie tier list guide.

Two different things get scored around this page. The S to D tiers above are editorial, and S means a film that held up rather than one that reviewed well on opening weekend. The score you see in the app is a different number: it is built from the head-to-head comparisons you make, scaled to 0 to 10, not from critic averages. How Shortlist scores work sets out the whole method.

Who Directed What: Miyazaki Made Fewer Than Half

Hayao Miyazaki directed 10 of the 24 Ghibli features, and seven other directors made the remaining 14. That surprises most people, because the 10 include almost every title a casual viewer can name. It also explains why a Ghibli tier list feels harder than a Marvel one: you are not ranking a house style, you are ranking eight authors who happened to share a building.

The two founders still set the poles. Hayao Miyazaki made the films defined by flight, fantasy and wonder: Spirited Away, Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle. Isao Takahata made the quieter, more experimental, often devastating ones: Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. Between them that is 15 of the 24, and a complete tier list has to weigh two very different kinds of greatness against each other before it even reaches the other six directors.

The remaining nine films are where most disagreements actually live. Goro Miyazaki has three and all three sit in C tier or below, which says as much about inheriting the family name as it does about the films. Hiromasa Yonebayashi has two and both land mid-table, in B and C. And the four one-off directors, Yoshifumi Kondo, Hiroyuki Morita, Tomomi Mochizuki and Michael Dudok de Wit, made films with nothing else in the catalogue to compare them against, which is exactly the situation where a head-to-head ranking beats a grid.

Where Should You Start with Studio Ghibli?

For newcomers, the best entry points are My Neighbor Totoro (gentle and short), Spirited Away (the universally acclaimed masterpiece), and Kiki's Delivery Service (warm and accessible). Save Grave of the Fireflies for when you're emotionally prepared: it's extraordinary, but it is not a comfort watch.

Studio Ghibli Tier List FAQ

What is the best Studio Ghibli movie?

Spirited Away (2001) is the consensus pick: it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and is frequently named one of the greatest films ever made. But Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies all have a serious claim.

How many Studio Ghibli movies are there?

There are 24 Studio Ghibli feature films as of 2026, beginning with Castle in the Sky (1986) and most recently The Boy and the Heron (2023). Other lists say 21, 22, 23 or 25 because they draw the line differently and rarely say so: the usual differences are dropping The Red Turtle (2016), which Studio Ghibli catalogues as its own work, dropping the two films that premiered on television, or adding Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984), which pre-dates the studio. No new Ghibli feature has been released since 2023, though Hayao Miyazaki has confirmed he is working on one.

Is The Red Turtle a Studio Ghibli movie?

Yes. The Red Turtle (2016) is a co-production between Studio Ghibli and the French companies Wild Bunch and Why Not Productions, directed by Michael Dudok de Wit with Isao Takahata as artistic producer, and Ghibli lists it in its own catalogue alongside Spirited Away. It is the only Ghibli feature not directed by a Japanese filmmaker and the only one with no dialogue. It won the Un Certain Regard Special Prize at Cannes in 2016 and was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2017.

Is Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind a Ghibli movie?

Technically no: Nausicaä (1984) was made before Studio Ghibli was founded in 1985. But it was directed by Miyazaki, its success led directly to the studio's creation, and Ghibli has distributed it ever since, so most fans consider it an honorary Ghibli film.

Which Studio Ghibli movie won an Oscar?

Two have: Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature in 2003, and The Boy and the Heron won the same award in 2024. Several others, including Howl's Moving Castle and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, were nominated.

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