Spirited Away needs no introduction. A hand-drawn animation masterpiece, the film broke so many records, shattered so many glass ceilings for animation as a category, and, to this day, remains a personal favourite and sets the bar for new-age animated films.

But 30 years before Studio Ghibli left a permanent mark on people’s hearts worldwide, Miyazaki released a short film that was very different from his later works.

Yuki’s Sun was released in 1972 and also features an orphaned but happy young girl. She wears jeans, climbs trees, and is funny and charming. Unlike Chihiro in the first half of the film, Yuki’s first impression is being a bundle of energy.

While many of Studio Ghibli’s later works with Hayao Miyazaki as director (and so much more) often feature dry characters, Yuki stands as a stark contrast with her charm and jubilance. Yuki’s Sun is a short film, yet it still shows Miyazaki’s signature storytelling: young girls learning to be resilient through life’s highs and lows.

Yuki’s Sun’s background, script, and environment are much simpler compared to later Ghibli works. Backgrounds are blue skies with white clouds; lands are green with some hints of grass; the train is amateur; and overall — simple.

Miyazaki’s movies are anything but simple.

Watching Yuki’s Sun after watching Yubaba’s quarters’ intricate designs, or the magnanimity of Castle in the Sky, or the sheer insanity of Howl’s Moving Castle’s design, and the layered scripts that take inspiration from multiple sources in each of his films, I could only pay my respects to the master and the legend who just kept pushing boundaries.

Many corners of the internet would say that the Oscars came to Miyazaki. He doesn’t need one of those. As an artist, Hayao Miyazaki breached the Ri stage of human imagination, 2D animation, and storytelling, packing so much more into his feature films.

In all its simplicity, I hold Yuki’s Sun in the same regard as I hold Spirited Away.

Jan Pinkava in Ratatouille said these forever words: Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

Yuki’s Sun is a testament to the fact that in three decades, a certain nobody from somewhere in Japan can become and has become what the world now deems genius.

Originally published at https://sangitaekka.com on September 24, 2026.

René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet needs no introduction. Every animation movie nerd knows about it and will happily discuss why humans deserve the treatment they got. My introduction to his 1966 short film, Les Escargots (The Snail), wasn’t through any popular OTT channels or because a friend told me about it. It came from one of the unlikeliest sources — a ’90s rock band video.

For the longest time, I believed that giant snails eating a farmer’s lettuces, laying waste in a city, kidnapping women, and killing people was the official video for Tool’s The Pot while the lyrics clearly say “Kangaroo done hung the jury with the innocent.”

Watching the full film, I realized there are tiers, and it is still relevant today, just like Tool’s song. Both works of art talk about predatory systems and the laws that protect them.

Farming is blood, sweat, and tears

A significant part of the film is dedicated to showing a farmer’s hard work. He plants rows of lettuces, and no matter how many times he waters them and cares for them, they will not grow unless the plants drink his tears.

So he gets creative. He uses onions to induce tears and hops from one lettuce to another. He reads himself morbid stories, digs up a dead relative, and physically tortures himself.

René Laloux portrays farming hardships, evokes sympathy, and makes the political visible so we can see where our food comes from.

The predator class will prey

Blood, sweat, and tears do not go to waste, so the land rewards the farmer with enormous lettuces that outgrow his house and become a beacon to snails.

Large lettuces lead to larger snails, and larger snails lead to bigger problems. Not only do they eat his labor, but they also lay waste to the city, causing accidents, abducting girls and women, killing people, and their presence triggers the replacement of the city’s original buildings with skyscrapers.

In the current context, I couldn’t help but think of the giant snails as data center owners and other overlords of capitalism because they are still the same predatory class that keeps taking, stays hungry, and never rests.

There’s no pesticide yet potent enough to stop them.

René Laloux took his time to draw a semi-nude woman

I always pay attention to the way animators draw women, the depths they are willing to dig in their characters, and how they clothe them. I draw conclusions about what a person thinks of women from how they portray them.

While gigantic snails are busy attacking the city, the film pauses to depict a woman undressing. The mood of the film shifts briefly till she is taken by one of the snails.

I wonder what else could have briefly shifted the mood of the film? A woman drinking coffee, or reading a book, or just sleeping, fully clothed.

Needless to say, the woman also fits the beauty standards.

Also read: Evolution of beauty standards in global animation and characters that don’t fit

The never-ending predatory cycle

The full film is not captured in The Pot video, and discovering the film’s end reinforces the idea that no matter how hard someone works and tries to grow something good, the current world under capitalism will create analogous entities to eat it.

René Laloux’s left-leaning ideology is not latent in his productions. Fantastic Planet’s surrealism and political critique extend beyond the main film, merging with shorter productions like Les Escargots without losing its potency.

Conflict with masters or “higher-ups” is present in both works — Fantastic Planet and The Snails, and so is the desire to break free.

Final Thoughts

Kangaroo is guilty as the government. And in the case of Les Escargots, the snails are predators and the government.

Les Escargots won multiple awards, including the Grand Prix at the Mamaïa Festival (Romania) and the Special Jury Prize at the Cracow Festival, and its adaptation into a fan video for a band, nearly 30 years after its original release, is a testament to its timelessness and its accurate commentary on modern life.

Originally published at https://sangitaekka.com on September 1, 2026.

Fathers hold an essential position in the family hierarchy and are seated at the top in a patriarchal setting. Animation movies often reflect this setup, even in anthropomorphized stories, making father figures unquestionable.

Animated dads are often depicted as decision-makers not just for their own lives but also for the collective future of their family. They tell their daughters to marry and demand sons to be manly. The portrayal of the relationships animated dads have with their animated wives is nearly non-existent. Romance is often reserved for single, unmarried characters. Queer stories are rare.

Also Read: The search for queer representation in the animation genre

Pixar’s Up, which to date has depicted one of the most romantic and tear-jerking aspects of a marriage, centers on a couple who can’t conceive. The male protagonist becomes a father figure only after his wife’s demise. The hugely popular anime Naruto doesn’t feature many female characters in wife roles, but it does highlight their maternal sides.

Animation films target a specific age group and ensure the story remains relatable to them. So while father figures are side characters, they have often been the silent heroes and villains, and we don’t talk about them enough.

The saga of single fathers

When Professor Utonium mixed sugar, spice, and everything nice with chemical X, he created the Powerpuff Girls. A gentle soul and a scientist, he is one of the best single dads in animation, caring for three young girls with distinct personalities.

When most dads are shown to be overprotective of their girls, Professor Utonium actively pushes Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup to go save Townsville. He believes in them, guides them, cooks for them, paints their room pink, and tucks them in after a long day of being heroes.

The Little Mermaid, Ariel, is a full-time troublemaker and the youngest of seven sisters. She’s a little older than the Powerpuff Girls, but not old enough to have a mermaid boyfriend (or girlfriend). She hangs out with a pufferfish and a crab, looking for human objects on the ocean bed. She’s a collector and an adventurist who often gets into trouble.

Ariel’s father, Triton, is the king of the ocean — a single father who controls the seven seas -and yet is shown struggling to raise Ariel. Their relationship is similar to that of a real dad and daughter.

Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin and Belle from Beauty and the Beast are older and more mature, and both have loving relationships with their single dads.

Jasmine’s father, the Sultan, keeps an open mind about his daughter’s relationship with Aladdin. The couple often hangs out in her room, goes on adventures or romantic outings, and is frequently shown to be romantically playful in front of Sultan. Jasmine’s attire that shows her cleavage and navel is nobody’s concern.

In the anthropomorphic sphere, Mr. Goose was every bit of a dad to an abandoned, Kung-Fu-obsessed panda. His simplified relationship with Po and a complicated one with Po’s birth father have life lessons for all of us, especially men.

Also Read: What does Kung Fu Panda 3 teach about the inevitability of relationship conflicts?

Loneliness and seeking companionship

It takes immense strength to be a single dad in real life. And while they care for their child, they also get lonely and seek companionship. The Chinese animated film Over the Moon explores adult loneliness in a movie intended for children.

When young Fei Fei loses her mother, she also loses the stories of the moon that her mother told her every night. She fights through, continues to excel in her studies, helps her dad at the bakery, and soldiers on.

On a random day, she finds a new woman in the house who’s roughly the same age as her dad. Her initial reaction is confusion, which quickly turns into anger.

Fei Fei is still lonely without a mother, misses her, but doesn’t express it. Her father, on the other hand, tries to hint at his adult loneliness, which his daughter is just too young to understand.

Over the Moon, in my opinion, is a dream of Fei Fei as she navigates the new candidate to play the role of her mother and acknowledges the loneliness of her father.

Some dads can definitely do better

Based on Malay folklore, Walinong Sari is a 2022 short film that centres on a brilliant princess who lost everything because her father was obsessed with marrying her off. Yes, that’s my introduction of the movie to you.

She was proficient in archery, spear, statecraft, and everything else a princess must learn. She excelled, and the best idea the king, her father, could think of was to marry her off. She was the rightful heir and a capable one, and her own father was blind to it.

Walinong Sari defeated every prince who challenged her in combat to claim her. She was brilliant, invincible, and was forced to wander in the jungles when she could have ruled.

The short film portrays the folklore like a sad film. I see it as a father’s failure.

Walinong Sari isn’t alone. Princess Kaguya shares a similar fate of homelessness because her earthly father made assumptions about his daughter’s happiness without asking her.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a Studio Ghibli film based on the old Japanese folklore, “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.” A bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl in a bamboo stalk; she is so small that she fits into his palms, and then grows by the time he reaches his house.

The film is a subtle commentary on women’s freedom or lack thereof. Kaguya is happy living her life in the mountains with her friends and just being herself. Her presence brought good luck to her earthly parents, and each gold coin bought her a new restriction.

Isao Takahata thought about the film fifty years before making it. He wondered that something must have gone wrong on the moon, causing Kaguya to choose an earthly life. And on earth, she is expected to be everything but herself. Expected to look and dress a certain way, entertain male attention who knew nothing about her, and was reduced to an object of desire.

She tells her father — “The happiness you wished for me was hard to bear.”

Also read: Five animation films with minimal visual details, Part 1

Final Thoughts

Animation films have rarely featured parental figures as the main characters, but they subtly shape the movie. Just like in real life, the presence or absence of a father makes a difference in a child’s life — often the main character.

No way the list is complete, and the viewpoint is narrowed to popular studios located in the US or Japan. There are stories and well-written fatherly characters, probably existing as character sketches or in the lonely corners of the World Wide Web, waiting to be discovered, to be written about.

Originally published at https://sangitaekka.com on November 15, 2025.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the majority of the population was confined to their homes, Studio Ghibli came to the rescue.

The screen time of people (who had the luxury and privilege of being at home or being stuck in the Himalayas) skyrocketed. A Ghibli film is a comfort zone for many people when the world feels chaotic and out of control.

Amidst the chaos, the studio decided to provide more aid.

Studio Ghibli has released free HD wallpapers from its films, which are directly downloadable from its website, provided that the wallpapers are used sensibly.

The sensibility that Ghibli demanded from people lost meaning with OpenAI with the “trend” of Ghiblifying personal pictures.

Millions of people, many of whom had never watched a single Ghibli film before, joined the social media trend and fed their personal pictures to a Generative AI model without a single thought of how the platform works, or the knowledge of unprecedented data theft of art, including Ghibli’s copyrighted content.

The trend infuriated me, especially when I saw posts from people I know who were aware of the data theft.

I concluded that most people do not care about art as long as it serves them. Ghibli is just another name to them and a means to “artify” their existence without paying an artist.

Since there is an audience for the Generative AI trash art, it’s essential to highlight some important and overlooked aspects of GenAI and AI in general.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

There’s a popular saying in the AI sector called “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” which means that the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input.

Notice that Generative AI models steal and train on the best artworks available-those created by artists who excel in their respective fields, whether traditional or digital.

The generative AI output is likable and popular solely because it’s trained on the finest art data available to humanity.

Assume the dataset came from children’s drawings or amateurs. The output would reflect the immaturity and the lack of skill and soul.

Will it sell? Childish art? Unskilled art?

No.

Bring Your Own Database

Nobody stops the GenAI owners from creating their own artworks and then feeding them into their system.

Since creating millions of high-quality artworks is a challenging task, GenAI owners opted to scrape, as if the primary purpose of producing the artworks was to serve as a source of training datasets.

They recognize the value of art, yet they steal it, belittle artists, force opt-outs, and threaten protective laws like copyright.

Conclusion

The high carbon footprint of AI models like OpenAI’s Sora2 is a known fact. Then why are the Generative AI models allowed to exist, invested in, and thrive in terms of popularity?

Considering for a moment that people do not care about artists. Still, they must be wary of deepfakes, of women whose pictures are taken from their handles and used to create porn, of the high carbon footprint of a planet that is already crossing threshold conditions. They must evaluate the tools beyond their shine and promise built on other people’s hard work.

Originally published at https://sangitaekka.com on October 8, 2025.