Suzuki Toshio speaks to Asahi Shimbun on AI's limits; highlights director Miyazaki's unique creative process

Studio Ghibli [Princess of Asturias Foundation website]
Studio Ghibli [Princess of Asturias Foundation website]

Suzuki Toshio, president and board chairman of Studio Ghibli and longtime producer of director Miyazaki Hayao's films, said AI may be able to mimic the outward appearance of the so-called "Ghibli style" but cannot replicate the studio's genuine expression and sensibility.

Speaking to the Asahi Shimbun in an interview published Sunday, Suzuki explained why he had turned down all media requests when the trend of generating "Ghibli-style" images using OpenAI's image-generation feature — released in 2025 — swept the internet.

"I thought everyone would get bored of it quickly, so I declined, and that's exactly what happened," he said. "A certain kind of animation can be made easily with AI, but anyone with even a little knowledge can immediately tell it's fake — because it has no real meaning or appeal."

Suzuki also said Miyazaki is so indifferent to worldly affairs that he is not even aware that generative AI exists. Yet the reason Miyazaki's work cuts so sharply into contemporary society, Suzuki said, is that the director "instinctively knows what is happening in the world right now."

Suzuki said Miyazaki's creative process stands in direct opposition to the data-gathering approach of AI. While making "The Boy and the Heron," which won the Academy Award for best animated feature film in 2024, Miyazaki cut himself off entirely from the outside world — no smartphone, no newspapers, no television — and devoted himself solely to creation in a state of complete information isolation.

According to Suzuki, experts described one of the film's most celebrated scenes — in which a human face suddenly emerges from inside a heron's mouth — as "an expression that could never be achieved with computer graphics." Suzuki said Miyazaki's method of shutting out all outside information "ultimately produced imagery that is the hardest thing for a computer to render."

Suzuki joined Studio Ghibli in 1989 and has produced nearly all of the theatrical animated films Miyazaki has made since then.


an@heraldcorp.com