Studio Ghibli Just Announced That It will No Longer Make Movies; Decision to Stop Production Due to High Costs and Poor Profits?

Studio Ghibli's decision to stop its movie-making ventures has saddened a lot of anime fans.

Toshio Suzuki, general manager of Studio Ghibli, has just recently announced about the Tokyo-based animation studio's decision to stop its production on Japanese television on Sunday. Studio Ghibli brought the world "Howl's Moving Castle", "Spirited Away", and "My Neighbor Totoro."

Suzuki informed the show Jounetsu Tairiku that Studio Ghibli has now decided to stop making films, after their 29 years of producing anime movies that have been loved by anime fans from all over the world. According to Suzuki, Studio Ghibli bosses arrived at this decision in order to downsize their staff to manage copyrights and trademarks on its current portfolio of 20 feature anime films.

Suzuki was the one who took over the daily running of Studio Ghibli when the studio's co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, retired just last year. He said on air, "Obviously, Miyazaki's retiring was quite significant. What should Ghibli do? Right about now, we will take a breather and think about what's next."

Although the axe was just brought down on Sunday, rumors about Studio Ghibli's demise have actually been going around for the past weeks. A Studio Ghibli insider has even made a forecast on the Japanese website News Café. According to the insider, the real reason why Studio Ghibli was struggling was because of the high production costs and poor profits of its latest movie releases. The staffer shared, "There's no choice but to dissolve the studio because it's unable to cross the high hurdle of announcing a new film on an annual basis."

Its film in 1984, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, was the successful anime flick that established Studio Ghibli as a movie-making entity in 1985. Since being established, Studio Ghibli then worked hard to build its reputation as a morally complex but family-friendly film-maker. It is because of Studio Ghibli that anime was popularized on a worldwide perspective, as it won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature back in 2003 for "Spirited Away."