WHAT OUR SEARCHES TELL ABOUT US

WHAT is Ghibli doing here?” I asked myself as I searched about searches this week.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

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.

Haiku poetry consists of three phrases in a 5-7-5 syllable pattern. These poems typically use evocative imagery to capture a fleeting moment in nature or daily life—and that is where we find an excellent match between Ghibli and haikus. They share a tendency to share human experience in condensed imagery. After all, Japan is the land of Zen, though the term is a derivation from the Indian dhyana. Just as well that Ghibli popped up among search favourites in the land where Buddhism was born.