Where to Start with Hayao Miyazaki
— Kiki’s Delivery Service and the Nausicaä Manga

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If you have never seen a Hayao Miyazaki film, or have not seen one since childhood, make your first Kiki’s Delivery Service. It runs about 102 minutes. A 13-year-old girl starts a life in a town where she knows no one, and the world is not scheduled to be saved. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke will tempt you too, but for today, one film is enough.

This film also has a reason of its own to be first right now. A 4K restoration opened on IMAX screens in the United States on March 13, 2026 (GKIDS announced Canada as well), and on Japanese IMAX screens that June. When the film opened in Japan, the advertising line read, roughly, “I got discouraged sometimes, but I’m doing fine” (my translation). It does not say what discouraged her. You can put your own year in that empty space, and I think that is what makes this film such a good door.

Open the film pages on Studio Ghibli’s official Japanese website one after another and the same line keeps appearing: “Original work, screenplay and direction: Hayao Miyazaki.” He is mostly discussed as an animation director, but by the official credits he is also the author of the original work on nine of the eleven features listed (the short On Your Mark is not counted). At least three of those original works are manga he drew himself. A manga site writing about Miyazaki can hardly walk past that credit.

A viewing order for first-timers

Studio Ghibli’s films are, as a rule, independent stories, so Miyazaki’s features do not need to be watched in release order. After Kiki’s Delivery Service, follow your mood and pick just one row.

With small children, the gentle order is My Neighbor Totoro, about two sisters moving to a farming village in Japan in the mid-1950s, and then Ponyo, in which a preschool boy named Sosuke meets a fish girl. The “another world” row has its reasons. Spirited Away is about a 10-year-old who wanders in by accident, and Howl’s Moving Castle is about a girl cursed into the body of a 90-year-old. Princess Mononoke is set in medieval Japan, in a struggle between people who make iron and the spirits of the forest, and it has scenes of war. On a short weekend, The Castle of Cagliostro from the adventure row or My Neighbor Totoro will fit.

Reading the “original work” credit

Here are the official credits in order of Japanese release. The same director’s films are not credited in one uniform way.

Only two have someone else’s name in that slot: Kiki’s Delivery Service and Howl’s Moving Castle. Kiki was the first time Miyazaki, in a feature at Studio Ghibli, filmed another author’s story. What does a person who has been drawing his own world do with a story placed in his hands? That is the second reason I send people here first. The film holds back the fantasy of the book and treats magic as a talent a person happens to have. Being able to fly becomes, plainly, a way to work and eat.

The last film is the confusing one. Its Japanese title, Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka, means How Do You Live?, and it comes from Genzaburo Yoshino’s novel of that name, which appears in the film as a book of great importance to the boy at its center. But the official credit for original work names Miyazaki. English readers meet the two under different titles, which helps: the novel is not the source of The Boy and the Heron. An English translation by Bruno Navasky came out in 2021. Pick them up as separate things.

Miyazaki the manga artist

As a boy Miyazaki is said to have been a fan of the manga of Osamu Tezuka and Shigeru Sugiura, and of Tetsuji Fukushima’s illustrated story Sabaku no Mao (The Evil Lord of the Desert). In high school he had the wish to become a manga artist, and even after joining Toei Animation as an animator in 1963 he did not leave paper behind. From September 1969 to March of the next year, under the name Saburo Akitsu, he ran People of the Desert in 26 installments in the weekly Boys and Girls Newspaper. He was 28 at the time.

The Eisner Awards, the American comics prize, placed Miyazaki in their Hall of Fame in 2014. There is enough on paper that it cannot be set aside as a film director’s hobby. Here are three ways in.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 7 volumes

If you have seen the film, you are the person who should open the manga. The film covers the story through page 66 of the second volume of the Japanese edition. That is partway through book two of seven. The remaining five books and change are a story the film’s audience has never seen, and after the serial resumed it goes somewhere the film does not.

The serial began in the February 1982 issue of the magazine Animage and ended in the March 1994 issue: 59 chapters, with about ten years between the film’s release and the last page. Four times the serial stopped, in part so that Miyazaki could make feature films. Lay those gaps beside the release dates.

Castle in the Sky, Totoro, Kiki and Porco Rosso all reached theaters while this manga was on hold. He would finish a film and go back to the next page of the same comic. Ten years of that traffic are folded into seven volumes. Before you open the first one, I would ask you to look at that table once. The time outside the panels is part of how long this work is.

Viz Media publishes the English edition, and two formats are on its site. The Box Set, released November 6, 2012, packs the whole series into two hardcovers (1,104 pages). The seven-volume edition came out through 2004 and is sold singly, so Volume 1 alone is a fine start. If a used copy turns up, check which printing it is: Viz’s earlier editions were flipped left to right and had English sound effects, and the 2004 “Editor’s Choice” edition is unflipped. I suggest the film first, then the manga. The film stops inside what is volume two, which in the Viz box set means inside the first hardcover, so you cross from a story you know into one you do not without a seam.

Shuna’s Journey

Shuna’s Journey appeared in June 1983 from Tokuma Shoten’s Animage paperback line, an illustrated story in full color. It is based on the Tibetan folk tale “The Prince Who Became a Dog” (my translation) and follows a prince traveling in search of grain. A man who as a boy loved an illustrated story set in the desert sat down and made an illustrated story of his own. First Second published an English translation by Alex Dudok de Wit in 2022, and in 2023 it won the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia. It is a single book, so if you want to test the line before committing to seven volumes, begin here.

Model-magazine comics, Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises

The most unexpected way in is a hobby magazine. Hayao Miyazaki’s Daydream Data Notes are illustrated essays and comics about military ships, planes and tanks, which he published irregularly in Model Graphix between jobs in animation. They ran from the November 1984 issue to the May 1990 issue, 13 installments of three to five pages each. Among them is The Age of the Flying Boat, the original work behind Porco Rosso. I will not explain away his love of aircraft by his family background, but he was born into a family that ran Miyazaki Airplane, where his father was a director.

Read side by side, the comic shows what the film added. The Age of the Flying Boat roughly anticipates the film’s plot, but it has none of the serious material: not Porco’s past, not Gina or Ferrarin, not the scenes of the Fascist government closing in. The film’s advertising line was “This is what cool means” (my translation). Much of that cool may be in the blank spaces the comic left and the film went back to fill.

This 15-page comic has been in English since 1993, when it ran in full color as “Crimson Pig: The Age of the Flying Boat,” translated by Matt Thorn, in the July to September issues of Viz’s magazine Animerica. We found no standalone English book of it. Viz’s shop does list “Original Story The Age of the Flying Boat” among the contents of the hardcover The Art of Porco Rosso. I have not seen those pages and cannot say how the comic is presented there, so check the contents before you pay for a copy.

The source of The Wind Rises is another serial comic in the same magazine, built on the life of the aircraft engineer Jiro Horikoshi and the fiction of Tatsuo Hori. It became a book in Japanese in 2015, Kaze Tachinu: Miyazaki Hayao no Moso Comeback. In spring 2026, Dainippon Kaiga also published Mokei Zasshi no Naka no Miyazaki Hayao (Hayao Miyazaki in the Model Magazines, my translation). MangaUpdates lists neither the Daydream Data Notes nor the Wind Rises comic as licensed in English, and it lists no English publisher for People of the Desert, so those links search for Japanese books and Amazon.com may show few results.

Two films have novels that keep going

Eiko Kadono’s Kiki’s Delivery Service does not stop where the film stops. The main series ran to six books over 27 years, ending in October 2009, and special-edition books followed in 2016, 2017 and 2022. In English, the first book exists in Lynne E. Riggs’s 2003 translation and Emily Balistrieri’s 2020 translation. Book 2, Kiki and the New Magic, came out in English for the first time on August 25, 2026, from Delacorte Press, and Book 3, Kiki and the Other Witch, is announced for February 23, 2027. If you liked the film, you can now read past it in English.

The source of Howl’s Moving Castle is Diana Wynne Jones’s novel of the same title, published in 1986. The details differ from the film; the heroine’s hair is red in the book, for one. Read it after the film and you can see what the same material becomes in another pair of hands.

Miyazaki before Ghibli

By one way of counting, his first feature is not on Studio Ghibli’s list at all. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, released in Japan on December 15, 1979, was Miyazaki’s debut as a theatrical film director. It is a Lupin III film from Monkey Punch’s manga, so Miyazaki is not credited with the original work. It is a tight 100 minutes of action. North America has had several English dubs; a new one came out in 2025, and Wikipedia says the Blu-ray that followed includes the earlier dubs too.

If you have plenty of time, there is the television series from the year before, Future Boy Conan. Its 26 episodes aired on NHK from April 4 to October 31, 1978, with Miyazaki directing every one, and it was in effect his directing debut. GKIDS carries it in North America. Save it for when feature films are no longer enough.

Watch the time no one explains

A step away from viewing orders, one thing about how to watch. Miyazaki’s films keep pictures that are not only there to push the story forward. I think that is why his films ask to be seen twice.

Take the rainy bus stop in My Neighbor Totoro. At the planning stage, Miyazaki’s image boards showed two versions of the meeting between the girl and Totoro: a rainy bus stop, and the garden of the house in daytime. The poster for the original release also used the early version of the girl standing with Totoro at that rainy stop. The picture chosen to be the film’s face shows no big event, only someone waiting for a bus in the rain. I find something well-mannered in that.

In Spirited Away a train runs below the bridge to the bathhouse. According to the setting recorded in the storyboard collection, the land around the bathhouse and the train’s destination is a great plain, which becomes sea when it rains. They had settled the world that far beyond where the girl wandered in. Next time you watch, stop for a moment in a scene where the story is in no hurry.

Where to watch

In Japan these features are hard to stream, but in English the picture is different.

• Stream in the United States: HBO Max has the Studio Ghibli catalog under a deal announced in 2019. A CBR article from 2026 calls it the only platform with the full collection apart from Grave of the Fireflies (not a Miyazaki film), and a Find This Movie guide that checked availability on October 11, 2026, puts all 11 of his Ghibli features there.
• Stream elsewhere: According to Wikipedia, Netflix took the catalog in 2020 for the regions where it operates outside the United States, with Canada under a separate deal with GKIDS. As of 2024 no deal had been announced for Japan. I could not confirm how this stands today, so check your own service.
• Buy: GKIDS sells the Ghibli films in North America. For Kiki’s Delivery Service, its page lists on-demand purchase and a Blu-ray and DVD edition with English, French and Japanese audio.
• Theaters: GKIDS brought Studio Ghibli Fest back in 2026 and handles the IMAX re-releases, and its site promises more news for 2027. The restored Kiki’s Delivery Service was shown in both the original Japanese with subtitles and the English dub.

One thing to wait on: Japan gets a 4K UHD and Blu-ray set of Kiki’s Delivery Service on November 25, 2026, but we found no North American 4K disc date. Blu-ray.com reported in February 2026 that none had been announced, and GKIDS’s film page lists no 4K disc as of November 9. The current North American disc is the GKIDS Blu-ray.

The last two to watch

The two films at the end of the grown-up row are the ones I would ask you to keep in order. The advertising line for The Wind Rises was “We must live” (my translation). In September of its release year, Miyazaki announced that he was retiring from making feature films. He withdrew that in May 2017, and in 2023, ten years later, The Boy and the Heron opened in Japan. It opened without even a trailer. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, at the 96th ceremony, came afterward, in March 2024.

Before a film handed over with no explanation at all, a few detours do no harm. But you do not have to plan that far today. Start with Kiki’s Delivery Service. “I got discouraged sometimes,” the line begins, and what comes after that is left for whoever is watching.