What was Studio Ghibli's first film?

The first film released under the Studio Ghibli name is Castle in the Sky, known in Japanese as Tenku no Shiro Laputa, which opened in August 1986. It follows Pazu and Sheeta, a mine boy and a girl who falls from an airship wearing a levitating stone, toward the floating island of Laputa, pursued by pirates and an army agent, in a story built from Miyazaki's lifelong materials: flight, lost civilisations, mines, and a weapon of the ancient world waiting at the centre of the garden.

The Nausicaa qualification matters and has its own page in this section. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was released in 1984, before Ghibli existed, produced at Topcraft with Miyazaki directing. Its success created the conditions and the team for Ghibli's founding, and the studio has treated it as family ever since, including it in its home video lines, but chronology is chronology: the first Ghibli production is Laputa.

As a founding statement the film is exact. It declares the studio's craft standard, with some of the most admired flying and crowd animation of its decade, its environmental theme, a civilisation destroyed by its own weapon and kept as a garden by a robot, and its preference for a working boy and a capable girl over any chosen hero. Almost everything Ghibli later became is present in embryo.

On disc, Castle in the Sky has been a fixture of every Ghibli home video line in Japan and the West, and its Japanese theatrical poster art, Sheeta falling through cloud above the title, is among the most reproduced images in the catalogue. Collectors comparing editions should use it as a benchmark title: it appears in every format from LaserDisc forward, so its release history traces the whole physical story of the studio in miniature.