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Ghibli, Ghiblification, Copyright and Style | Author's Alliance

While it might be tempting  to want to protect the Ghibli style, we should remain mindful of the core purpose of copyright: to promote creativity for the public good (“The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an `author’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.”) Overzealous protection of style risks enclosing the common building blocks creators rely on, preventing one creator from building on the style of another. 

We can think of it on an even smaller scale – Studio Ghibli was founded in 1985, over twenty years after Hayao Miyazaki had started working in animation. Imagine if Miyazaki had not been able to carry the style he had cultivated during those twenty plus years of previous work into his new studio. If style itself becomes too easily monopolized, we could easily find ourselves in an impoverished creative landscape, as barren and unwelcoming as the red clay earth of Blade Runner’s dystopian vision.

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