WHAT OUR SEARCHES TELL ABOUT US

REVERSE SWING

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

WHAT is Ghibli doing here?” I asked myself as I searched about searches this week. The Japanese animation studio emerged as an unlikely element in the list of top searches in India in 2025 on Google’s annual country-wise list of what people looked up online.

For the uninitiated, ‘Ghiblification’ refers to an Al-generated image that creates a dreamy hand-drawn aesthetic after the signature style of Japan’s Oscar-winning animation studio, Ghibli.

Being old-fashioned, I am inclined to see Ghibli’s art as a visual equivalent of the haiku, the spare, traditional Japanese poetry form. As I checked for similarities, to my pleasant surprise, I found a clear link. The studio’s stylistic experiments and its fans’ imagination result in what a Marxist or Hegelian philosopher might call a creative dialectic. Fans often pair Ghibli stills with original haiku to capture the movies’ vivid imagery centred on themes such as family and ecology.