Ghibli And Food
This is a fun one. I know that I have been writing about movies like When Marnie Was There and Grave of the Fireflies and those films while great are not that fun. This is a fun article about the Studio Ghibli food that is in every film.
Almost Every Ghibli film has a scene with food. The first Studio Ghibli film I ever saw was Spirited Away. Spirited Away is about a ten-year-old girl whose parents become pigs after eating the food of the spirits and she has to work in a bathhouse for the spirits. The food the parents ate in the scene where they turned into pigs looked so delicious that I just wanted it for myself. The food looked so good that I wanted to know what those dishes were. The food looked savory and it was dripping in sauce.
Ghibli is known for its depictions of food in its anime. I get hungry just watching Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle make eggs and bacon with the hugest and thickest pieces of bacon I have ever seen. The scene is just mouth-watering.
My tummy sometimes just growls whenever I watch a Ghibli film. For example in the movie Ponyo when Soske’s mom makes ramen with eggs and Ponyo’s favorite food ham. It looks better than the real thing. I now think of Ponyo whenever I eat ramen. I want to try ramen with eggs and ham.
Food in Ghibli films can be used as a way to find comfort. In Grave of the Fireflies for example the 4-year-old Setsuko was obsessed with these gumdrops that came in a hard tin can. The film took place during World War 2 and food in Japan was hard to come by. She would shake the can. Her older brother Seita even once filled the can with water. The fact company that actually produced the real candy closed its doors after 114 of business.
Ghibli has even used food as a plot device to move the story. The Secret World of Arrietty is based on the book The Borrowers. It follows Arrietty and her family. They are all small people who borrow things that the humans would not notice were gone. A younger human is visiting to get some rest. On Arrietty’s first she drops the sugar cube that she is carrying right in front of the younger human. He returns it to her with a note.
Only Yesterday is about a 27-year-old woman named Taeko reminiscing about her 10-year-old self while on a trip to her sister’s in-laws' farm to work picking safflower. There is a scene with ten-year-old Taeko where she and her family are eating their first pineapple. At first, nobody in the family knows how to cut and prepare it until the eldest sister Nanako goes to the market and asks there. The scene shows Nanako cutting up the pineapple into slices. Taeko is dancing around the room with a slice of pineapple up to her nose and singing “pineapple” repeatedly. Watching Nanako cut up the pineapple and how the pineapple is drawn I can almost smell the pineapple through the screen. The family all sit down to enjoy the pineapple and they don’t like it. They declare that bananas are the superior fruit and give the rest to Taeko. Taeko on the other hand loves it.
The point is that Ghibli artists are not just talented at animating people and animals but also at food. They make Japanese food look so delicious that I want to try something that I have never had the opportunity to try before.
For your enjoyment