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Studio Ghibli Films Explore the Ritual of Coming Home

The act of entering one's home, though mundane, can be understood as a psychological ritual of passage, a concept explored in the animated worlds of Studio Ghibli.

Philosophers like Gaston Bachelard and anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep have described how homes possess psychological weight and how entering a home mirrors a rite of passage with stages of separation, transition, and incorporation.

Studio Ghibli films, such as 'My Neighbor Totoro,' 'Spirited Away,' and 'Howl's Moving Castle,' visually dramatize these ideas, depicting homes as spaces that are already half-inhabited by imagination and dreams, and where characters undergo transformations upon entering new, often magical, thresholds.

These films often build plots around characters' journeys through liminal spaces, where they are not fully in their old reality but not yet immersed in their new one, highlighting the symbolic work of thresholds.

Contemporary living, with open-plan layouts and hybrid work, can diffuse this ritual, blurring the lines between exterior and interior spaces, and social media trends often favor staged homes over those rich with accumulated memory.

Ghibli films also offer moments of stillness, like extended silent scenes, which evoke 'mono no aware,' a gentle awareness of the transience of ordinary moments, providing an escape from productivity-oriented lives.

These quiet moments and the films' representations of homecomings allow viewers to reconnect with their own 'felicitous spaces,' reminding architects of the potential to design environments that are worth returning to and that can hold stillness.

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