It all started last Tuesday when a relatively obscure tech entrepreneur, Grant Slatton, uploaded a seemingly ordinary family photo to ChatGPT-4o’s new image generator to “Ghiblify” it. Awash in pastel skies and gentle smiles, the image it spat out was the perfect encapsulation of the studio’s aesthetic.

The post went viral, amassing more than 43 million views in just a couple of days and prompting an eruption of Ghibli content. Suddenly no meme could escape Ghiblification. And backlash swiftly followed. Some critics took aim at the obvious intellectual property ambiguities. Others circulated clips of a 2016 documentary where Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki declared AI animation “an insult to life itself”.

However, this rapid onset Ghiblification foreshadows a much darker, and crucially stranger future than mere IP infringement and artistic degradation. In tech criticism, it is fashionable to contrast two dystopias: Beijing versus Las Vegas. The former is well-known. It foretells a 1984 Orwellian future of mass surveillance and thought control, turbocharged by AI-powered spyware. This is best characterized by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher’s warnings of a Chinese Communist Party-exported “Orwellian” AI surveillance dystopia.

In contrast, the Las Vegas dystopia envisions a future where we are distracted by entertainment as foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This vision, proposed by Neil Postman in his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, presents the future where “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.” This is a future of limbic capitalism where we are inundated by the addictive soma of Las Vegas pleasures. Books don’t need to be banned, because everybody’s too busy scrolling, eating fast food, gambling, gaming, and watching porn.

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Yet the rise of Ghiblification presents a third tech future, not from Beijing or Las Vegas — but from Tokyo. This is not a future of mere tech surveillance or opiate. Rather, it’s a vision of the world that fuses the pleasures machines of Vegas with the emotional worldbuilding of the Japanese otaku subculture — a niche consumer tribe known for their devotion to anime, manga, and video games. While long subjugated to their parent’s basements, weird corners of the Internet, and Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, otaku is now going mainstream.

In order to make sense of how this unique style of consumption is shaping our future, we must understand two macro shifts: one cultural, the other technological. The first is the mainstreaming of a postmodern otaku logic that prizes fiction over fact and vibes over shared mythologies. The second is the potent concoction of next generation multimodal AI and their capacity to create custom alternative realities with the touch of a button. Together, they herald a future not of a shared digital commons, but of hyper-personalized Matrixes-for-One.

To grasp the first shift requires digging out Japanese media theorist Hiroki Azuma’s 2001 cult media theory book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Chronicling the rise of Japan’s otaku subculture, Azuma coined the term “database animals” to describe a new kind of postmodern consumer emerging from the worlds of manga and anime obsession. These consumers no longer follow grand narratives or cohesive story arcs. Instead, they graze from a vast database of aesthetic elements, characters, and tropes — selecting whatever fragments give them the most effective hit. They are “animals” not in a pejorative sense, but in that they prioritize instinctual pleasure over ideological coherence or shared meaning.

Azuma explains the rise of otaku subculture in the context of what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called the “decline of the grand narrative”. From the late-18th to the mid-20th century, overarching grand narratives were the cornerstones of modernity, providing order and meaning for citizens. Now, in a thoroughly postmodern world where traditional horizons of meaning have collapsed, “grand narratives” have given way to something very different.

Grand narratives, according to Azuma, function like a tree. The trunk is the big “worldview” — a shared mythos that structures culture. From this trunk grow the branches and twigs of “small narratives”, the everyday stories, rituals, and traditions that reinforce and transmit the deeper worldview. In essence, the “surface outer layer” of small stories, rituals, and acts of consumption connects consumers to the “deeper inner layer” of the grand narrative. In Britain, rituals like churchgoing, learning Shakespeare, or buying a royal-warranted Wedgwood teapot tethered citizens to the mythos of God, King, and country. Similarly in Japan, reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, visiting shrines, conducting tea ceremonies bound citizens to a virtuous vision of Emperor, nation, and spiritual destiny.

Azuma argues that these grand narratives were disrupted by waves of turmoil. First came the Westernization of the Meiji Restoration, then the Second World War. In their wake, citing Jean Baudrillard, Azuma describes an emergent postmodern world where the trunk-and-branch models of reality are replaced by a rhizomatic “hyper reality”. In this world, meaning becomes a tangled web where the lines between truth and fiction blur, and symbols become unmoored from the realities they once represented. Here, the grand narratives are “swallowed by the chaos of a sea of simulacra”, a world where there are “no originals and no copies”. All that survives is endlessly circulating fragmented content with no shared story — if only Baudrillard were alive to see our world inebriated by memes, trends, and vibes.

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This post-modern hyperreality breeds ideological chaos. As the grand narratives collapsed — in Japan and globally — their absence was felt in various ways. Azuma argues that the otaku were the first to trailblaze a new mode of reality-making in a world stripped of unifying mythologies. Abandoning conventional “narrative consumption”, they pioneered what he calls “database consumption”: a logic that replaces the tree-and-branch structure with a database and hyper-individualized pick-and-mix consumer mindset. Stories are no longer linear journeys with moral arcs, they become modular fragments, plucked from a database of options and consumed as highly personalized forms of pleasure and identity-making.

Azuma observes that otakus — in contrast to regular fans — are almost entirely uninterested in official canon or coherent storytelling. Rather, they are obsessed with animalistically chasing an emotional rush — known as moe — triggered by modular elements of certain manga/anime characters. Different otakus chase different “moe-elements” (or moe-yoso). Some are visual: cat ears, knee-high socks, specific hairstyles, maid or sailor outfits, flaming swords. Others are more abstract: distinctive speech patterns, familiar plot beats, even particular curves or camera angles.

Otakus call the hunt for this affective sugar hit chara-moe. Many actively search for their preferred moe elements regardless of what franchise or series they come from. Further, otakus use search engines like TINAMI to filter the endless databases and feast on their moe of choice — whether it is styles of ships or spectacles, or just good old-fashioned bikinis.

For Azuma, what distinguishes the otaku is not their devotion to manga or anime per se, but their distinctive mode of database consumption. While the objects of their obsession — Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sylvanian Families — have had an obvious cultural spillover into the West, it’s this underlying logic of fragmented, non-narrative consumption that has truly gone mainstream. The seemingly endless and narratively incoherent Marvel Cinematic Universe and online culture wars demonstrate the hypnotic power of non-linear database consumption over linear grand, cohesive narratives. Our media landscape now resembles an endless database of familiar image templates, catchphrases, and decontextualized references — shared and reshuffled for the sheer thrill of recognition. To giggle at and share an AI Ghibli meme that hits right is to indulge in chara-moe. In essence: if database consumption is now the primary driver of demand, then it’s now suddenly met with a perfectly created and curated supply.

Which brings us to the macrotrend powering Ghiblification: the rise of next-generation multimodal AI. Last week’s ChatGPT-4o update offered a glimpse of what happens when ordinary users are handed tools to conjure images in any style they wish, instantly. While Ghibli aesthetics may have stolen the spotlight, the algorithm’s reach is far broader. From Lego to Pixar, South Park to The Simpsons, the internet has exploded with a surreal parade of fan-made transformations. Ghibli versions of The Office. Pixar versions of Severance. The possibilities are endless. Ghiblification is not really about Studio Ghibli, it’s about the turbocharging of hyperreality with AI.

This shift is being driven by a new frontier in generative AI: the rise of multimodal, or “omnimedia” large language models. Just a few months ago — the Dark Ages, in AI terms — most models were siloed by medium. To write or code you used ChatGPT or Perplexity. To create an image, DALL·E or Midjourney. To create a video, Runway or OpenAI’s Sora were your best bet. Yet with the latest update to ChatGP-4o (the “o” stands for omni), we have entered a stratospheric new era. Very soon, models will no longer be confined to one input or output. Instead, they are being stitched together across modalities — capable of inhaling and exhaling text, image, video, audio, and more. In this new “anything-to-anything” paradigm, you can turn a photo into a cartoon, a game, a song — even a 3D-printed statue. With just a single, frictionless prompt each of us becomes the world-builder of our own private universe.

It’s only going to get faster. The primary barrier to fully automated Ghiblification is no longer AI developer genius or human creativity, but computing power. Today, it takes 30 seconds to generate a near-perfect detailed image. Soon it will be instant. In 2024 alone, tech firms poured more than $100 billion into AI processing infrastructure to speed things up. By 2028, that number is forecast to go over $200 billion. The direction is clear: the only thing standing between users and immersive, personalized AI worlds — whether they be Ghibli, Pixar, or South Park — is processing time. IP rights and energy costs may be barriers, but on matters of AI, it seems that politicians are more concerned with Chinese AI drone swarms than artists’ rights and emissions. Everything else — the demand, the tech, the servers — is there.

Furthermore, it’s amplified by a different kind of AI: interest-graph recommender algorithms. In recent years, feed curation has quietly shifted from the social graph (what you and your friends like and follow) to the interest graph (what you actually pay attention to). The algorithms of TikTok’s “For You” page do not care what you claim to value; they optimize for what you linger on. And what do people want? AI slop. As Altman put it: “one man’s slop is another man’s treasure”. The latest research backs it up. A recent blind study found that most people genuinely prefer AI pastiches of the great poets to the real thing. On a critical level, it is easy to say one believes in the Miyazaki and Nick Cave characterization of AI creativity as “a grotesque mockery”. In practice it’s harder. While older models made creepy, creatively bankrupt pastiches, emerging visual models are increasingly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Ghiblification is unlikely to be a fleeting trend.

And so here we are at the beginning of the new age of Otaku, possibly the end of shared reality as we know it. While reflecting on the creative process, Miyazaki once explained that “the creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos”. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the opposite is happening. Reality is being shattered into billions of AI-crafted otaku worlds for one, but perhaps that’s exactly what we want.

The Eighties was an era of trade frictions between Japan and the West, of bellicose political rhetoric and literal Japan-bashing: American lawmakers gleefully took sledgehammers to Japanese electronics on the steps of Congress. But my friends and I were not deterred, enchanted as we were by animated fantasies so strikingly different from anything in our own culture. And even then, we could tell that there was something different about a certain anime auteur. His name was Hayao Miyazaki.

It is the rare creator who possesses the knack of appealing simultaneously to casual moviegoers, die-hard genre fans and tastemakers alike. Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, set records when it was released in Japan this year; this weekend, it made history as the first original anime movie to reach number 1 in both American and Canadian cinemas. Influential international devotees include Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro, who took David Cronenberg to a screening of Miyazaki’s beloved ode to childhood, My Neighbor Totoro. And last year, a stage adaptation of Totoro premiered at the Barbican to so much acclaim that it has been revived already.

Miyazaki never set out to appeal to the outside world, let alone change it; he claims to be “baffled” by the popularity of his work abroad. Nevertheless, his films have captivated generations of foreign audiences — and transformed our view of Japan. The nation made itself rich by selling the world things, ranging from appliances to automobiles. But Japan made itself popular by selling us fantasies: anime, manga, Nintendo. Where my grandfather’s generation saw an aggressive foreign power, mine saw a factory of dreams.

Today, Japan is associated with cleanliness and order, but when anime was born, in the decades after the Second World War, the scars of conflict were everywhere and civil unrest commonplace. In 1960, millions of Japanese rallied to protest the Anpo, a military treaty with the United States that war-weary citizens fiercely opposed, for fear — justified, as it turned out — that it would drag their nation into America’s conflicts. The ruling party eventually railroaded it through parliament by forcibly ejecting politicians who dissented: a blatant rejection of democracy, which triggered demonstrations that would escalate into open violence over the course of the decade.

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It was in this era that Miyazaki joined the ranks of Toei, then Japan’s biggest animation company, as a fresh university graduate. His career was minted mere months after anime itself: on the New Year’s Day that year, 1963, Japan’s first domestically produced, full-length animated television series, Mighty Atom, had debuted. Its creator, Osamu Tezuka, proudly described his work as anime, a contraction intended to distinguish it from imported animeshon, as imported foreign cartoons were known. Mighty Atom reminds us that protest runs in anime’s blood: the very first episode ends with a mass demonstration, as robots take to the streets to demand equality.

Across Japan, workers struggled against managers. Toei was no different. Miyazaki’s early years there were marked by low wages and unpaid overtime; he soon banded together with fellow animators in a labour union to protest. The vice president of the union, Isao Takahata, took a shine to the young Miyazaki, and recruited him to work on a new animated feature he was directing. Takahata aimed to jettison Toei’s established corporate structure in favour of making art on more democratic, even communal terms. The resulting film was a commercial failure; the partnership was a success.

Over the course of the Seventies, Miyazaki and Takahata, worked on a series of children’s shows. But manga and anime were evolving rapidly from kid’s stuff into something more, firing up a generation of young adults who were passionate about righting the wrongs of the world. Western authorities strictly regulated illustrated entertainment with measures such as “comics codes” and “comics campaign councils”. In Japan, artists were left to their own devices, allowing manga to emerge as a platform for delivering biting socio-political commentary, right under the noses of the establishment.

Japanese student demonstrators carried copies of manga Weekly Shōnen Magazine into their protests against the Vietnam War. And when members of the Japanese Red Army hijacked a passenger jet in 1970, they sent a missive claiming responsibility to the press that ended with the words “Never forget: we are Tomorrow’s Joe” — the name of a popular manga character who fights his way out of crushing poverty through boxing.

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Miyazaki always claimed to eschew politics in favour of symbolism. “I have no interest whatsoever today in producing animation as part of an ‘art’ movement, in trying to bring attention to social issues, or in sending out messages,” he wrote in a 1985 essay for Japanese readers. “I want to create works that children can enjoy.” But the bite of his convictions, which bubble up in his works in quiet ways, is precisely what gives his films such power. It is impossible to ignore its ever-present anti-authoritarian bent.

It was an original feature film called Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind that served as Miyazaki’s breakthrough. Arriving in Japanese cinemas in 1984, it told the story of a young woman in a dystopian future, where Earth is now a toxic jungle, filled with poisonous air, towering fungi, and enormous insects. Fiefdoms of human survivors feud endlessly over what little habitable land remains. Miyazaki was not globally famous at this point, but Nausicaä was released abroad, albeit after being disastrously re-edited and censored.

Foreign anime fans sought out Nausicaä in its uncut, untranslated form. The coveted bootlegged VHS arrived in my parent’s basement towards the end of the Eighties, and even on a fuzzy cathode-ray tube screen, even without subtitles, the film proved revelatory. It is classic Miyazaki: a young female protagonist navigates a strange world; venal adult authority figures clash with young dreamers; the story gently guides the viewer to question class and power, war and peace. Here is a fundamentally countercultural Japanese worldview, expertly cloaked in artistic allegory. Watching this wild drama made it impossible for me or my friends to view Japan as an enemy or a rival. How could it be, when its fantasies spoke to us so deeply?

After Nausicaä, Miyazaki’s rise was meteoric, and inextricably linked to Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded in 1985. While rivals pursued lucrative corporate sponsorship, Studio Ghibli was self-funded, which gave it total creative control. Now, the studio’s reputation has reached such heights that it recently made the unthinkable decision not to promote The Boy and the Heron at all. Despite reportedly being one of the most expensive Japanese films ever made, Ghibli released no trailers, no print ads, no interviews, no press screenings, nothing at all save one cryptic poster. It had the biggest opening weekend in Studio Ghibli history.

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But the flip side of total creative control was that neither Takahata nor Miyazaki could cede enough of it to anoint a successor. Takahata passed away in 2018, and Miyazaki, now 82, has announced and renounced his own retirement numerous times. Ghibli continues to flourish as a business, but its future remains uncertain: the closure of the production division was announced in 2014, only for it to be reopened long enough for Miyazaki to make The Boy and the Heron. That film’s stunning success has led to rumblings of another production in the works, but nothing concrete has been announced. Earlier this year, the studio sold a controlling stake to the Japanese television network NTV, ending nearly four decades of independence.

Ghibli’s concerns about its future mirror those of Japanese society as a whole. In the half-century since Miyazaki’s 1963 debut, Japan emerged as an economic superpower, before becoming a case study in stagnation. It is one of the oldest societies on the planet, Japan’s young people seem to see the world quite differently from Miyazaki’s; they are a minority, after all. They express less hope and less faith in their ability to affect meaningful political change, if multiple surveys are any indication.

Stagnation seems to have brought the dreams of anime down to Earth, too. New features focus less on changing the world than simply finding ways to survive in it — or escaping it altogether, as in the hugely popular genre of isekai, literally “other worlds”, where protagonists flummoxed by reality find meaning for themselves in fantasy realms. A demand for adventure has given way to a hunger for comfort and familiarity. Your Name became a hit in 2016 by cut-and-pasting a hodgepodge of anime clichés. It was set not in a vividly rendered imaginary world but a Tokyo so meticulously accurate that fans can use its scenes as a literal tourist map. Miyazaki, perhaps unsurprisingly, is notoriously ambivalent about the direction anime has taken in recent years, concerned that it has become narcissistic.

“I think that animated movies can relax, cheer and refresh,” he said in a 1983 interview. “And in so doing, they can help us escape from ourselves.” But through his work, Miyazaki has proven that anime is more than a form of entertainment; it can bridge cultures, and help young people understand and come to terms with the world in which they find themselves. We need it as much as we ever have — even though, or perhaps especially because, it feels harder to dream these days.