What are the Ghibli films in order?
A release order Ghibli shelf begins in 1986: Castle in the Sky, then the 1988 double bill of My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989, Only Yesterday in 1991, Porco Rosso in 1992, Pom Poko in 1994, and Whisper of the Heart in 1995, directed by Yoshifumi Kondo, the gifted animator whose early death the studio still marks. Ocean Waves, the 1993 television film by Tomomi Mochizuki, sits beside the theatrical list rather than inside it.
The second era is the blockbuster era: Princess Mononoke in 1997, My Neighbors the Yamadas in 1999, Spirited Away in 2001, The Cat Returns in 2002, directed by Hiroyuki Morita as a Whisper of the Heart companion, Howl's Moving Castle in 2004, Tales from Earthsea in 2006, directed by Goro Miyazaki, Ponyo in 2008, and Arrietty in 2010, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi.
The third era diversifies and thins: From Up on Poppy Hill in 2011, The Wind Rises and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya together in 2013, When Marnie Was There in 2014, the co-production The Red Turtle in 2016, Earwig and the Witch in 2020 as the studio's computer animated experiment, and The Boy and the Heron in 2023. Schedules, directors and the studio's pauses are all legible in that spacing: two films in a year at the peak, then years of quiet.
Japanese box sets have organised this list for collectors in their own way, most prominently the Blu-ray collection that gathers the Miyazaki directed features as a single authored set, while the Takahata films received their own collected treatment. A release order shelf and a director order shelf are both defensible; mixing editions mid run is the one choice that reads as accident rather than intent, since Ghibli packaging design changed distinctly between the DVD and Blu-ray generations.
