A Visual Celebration of Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys
A few weeks ago, I posted about the hundreds of stills from their animated movies that Studio Ghibli has made available for free download. Since I’m a big fan of the weird little guys director Hayao Miyazaki loves to put in his films (e.g. the kodama in Princess Mononoke1 and Spirited Away’s soot sprites), I thought it would be cool to pull some images from the Ghibli archive featuring these lovable little freaks.
And an honorable mention to this frame from Porco Rosso:
The weird little guys category generally doesn’t apply to humans, but this image of little kids crawling all over a pig man’s airplane certainly classifies as an unusual swarm.
- I bought a shirt with a kodama on it after seeing Princess Mononoke in 1999. At some point, I got rid of the shirt — why the hell did I do that?! It was very close to this shirt on Etsy selling for $288…the collar/sleeve color was a dark blue or black on mine.↩
Comments 4
The kodama from Princess Mononoke are probably my favorites, but it's hard to argue against the sassy energy of the soot sprites.
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Post of 2025!
Great curation. Hope the shirt finds it way back to you on this timeline.
Soot sprites in My Neighbor Totoro.
I’m also a fan of these weird little characters.
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