Gorō Miyazaki
Studio Ghibli Director
Studio Ghibli director and son of Hayao Miyazaki who argues that AI, lacking lived human experience, can automate an animator’s tasks but never replicate the emotional depth that defines Ghibli’s films.
In his words
It is impossible to create something with the same sense, approach and attitude that my father’s generation had.
It wouldn’t be surprising if, in two years’ time, there was a film made completely through AI.
Biography
Gorō Miyazaki (born 1967) is a Studio Ghibli director and the son of co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. He directed Tales from Earthsea, From Up on Poppy Hill, and Ghibli’s first fully 3DCG feature, Earwig and the Witch (2020) — a background in digital production that gives his skepticism about AI added weight.
Lived experience can’t be trained
Speaking with AFP at Studio Ghibli in Tokyo in March 2025 — as OpenAI’s image generator set off a viral wave of “Ghibli-style” pictures — Gorō granted that AI could eventually automate an animator’s tasks and that a fully AI-made film might arrive within a couple of years. But he argued that the emotional intricacy of his father’s and Isao Takahata’s work grew from lived experience, including a generation that “knew war,” which no model can reproduce.
His conclusion about his father was flat: “It’s not like they can be replaced.” Gorō questioned whether audiences would even want to watch fully AI-generated animation, suggesting that technical capability does not guarantee that anyone will care about the result.
The interview landed at a charged moment: his father Hayao’s 2016 line calling an AI demo “an insult to life itself” had resurfaced as millions remixed Ghibli’s look. Gorō’s framing is subtler — not revulsion, but a claim about where artistic meaning comes from. See also Hayao Miyazaki.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/goro-miyazaki