It has been a decade since Studio Ghibli last released a hit film, Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises in 2013. Since then, anime films by other creators have challenged Ghibli's box-office predominance, from One Piece Film Red to Makoto Shinkai's Suzume. Despite this, Ghibli remains the best-known anime studio in Japan and worldwide. Even if Miyazaki's film, How Do You Live?, is a bomb at the box-office this summer, the studio's reputation will still be upheld by spinoffs such as the award-winning My Neighbor Totoro stage play, which will return to London this November, the Spirited Away play being screened in American cinemas, and the Ghibli Museum and theme park attracting crowds in Japan.

A new book, Studio Ghibli: An Industrial History by the British academic Rayna Denison, offers several alternative perspectives on the studio. They're bolstered by Denison's research – she quotes numerous Japanese-only sources. Like many academic books, it has a high price tag, so most readers will prefer to order it from a library. The book assumes you're familiar with the many English-language books and films about Ghibli already, such as Miyazaki's essay collections Starting Point and Turning Point, Steve Alpert's memoir Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man, and documentaries such as The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness and 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki. One oft-overlooked book is Toshio Suzuki's slim but valuable memoir, Mixing Work With Pleasure, translated in 2018.

Denison says early on that she's concerned about the "mythologization" growing up around Ghibli and its best-known artist, Hayao Miyazaki. Each chapter of her book looks at a different aspect of Ghibli, starting with the accounts of its origins and moving on to working conditions at the studio and its treatment of women (its real women employees, not Ghibli's fantasy heroines). Later chapters reveal how Ghibli has approached CGI, how it promotes itself through exhibitions, museums, and the Ghibli Park, how its famous films are supported by commercials and other lesser-known works, and how it has handled its notorious problem of finding new directors.

The chapter on Ghibli's origins is an excellent example of Denison's alternative perspectives. We are used to thinking of Ghibli as being formed to showcase the work of Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. However, Denison points out that one could equally see Ghibli's founding as a bid by its parent company, Tokuma Shoten, to create an anime franchise. This follows not only Miyazaki's pre-Ghibli Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind but also Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's Arion, the Gundam artist's take on a Greek myth. Both films were produced by Tokuma in the run-up to Ghibli's founding. Although Denison doesn't mention it, it's worth noting that Arion has a Joe Hisaishi score, and the hero's ally Seneca is voiced by Mayumi Tanaka, who voiced Pazu in Ghibli's Castle in the Sky around the same time.

Arion isn't viewed as a "Ghibli" (or even Ghibli-adjacent) anime today. On the other hand, many people do think Nausicaä is a Ghibli film, as it's always collected with Ghibli films in home editions and streaming packages. Other titles make you wonder where Ghibli starts and ends. The 2016 film The Red Turtle (pictured right) was co-produced with Ghibli, with a Totoro title card, but it was animated thousands of miles away in France. Studio Ponoc's Mary and The Witch's Flower is definitely not Ghibli, but it involved loads of Ghibli alumni and looks stunningly like a Ghibli film.

A more esoteric quasi-Ghibli title is Hideaki Anno's live-action film Shiki-Jitsu (Ritual Day) in 2000, which was produced by Ghibli's subsidiary Studio Kajino. This feels like a real-world coda to Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which real director Shunji Iwai (The Case of Hana & Alice) plays a burned-out fictional director who's a transparent stand-in for Anno (or Shinji?). He goes to Anno's hometown of Ube and encounters a troubled girl who might be a version of Asuka. Incidentally, the girl is played by Ayako Fujitani, who wrote the book on which the film is based and is Steven Segal's daughter.

Even leaving such obscure crossovers aside, Ghibli has a blurry identity for a company that's made a tiny amount of animation compared with many anime studios. Many people just think of Ghibli as the Miyazaki studio, though a faction of critics and fans insist that Miyazaki is only Ghibli's second best director after Takahata. Ghibli's popular image has been fixed by films like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, not by Takahata's visually diverse classics such as Grave of the Fireflies or The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.

Denison doesn't weigh up those two masters herself. Instead, she draws attention to Ghibli's works by other hands, including Yoshiyuki Momose, Osamu Tanabe, and Takeshi Inamura, who all created commercials at Ghibli as well as contributing to the studio's features. Momose oversaw animated music videos for the electronic group Capsule, made at Studio Kajino, called Portable Kuukou and Space Station No. 9. He later moved to Studio Ponoc to create and direct the “Life Ain't Going to Lose” segment of Modest Heroes, about an egg-allergic boy.

Denison points up that Ghibli's producer and sometime President Toshio Suzuki has made brutal comments about what working at Ghibli can be like, even for an artist as great as Yoshifumi Kondō – Suzuki claimed that Kondo was abused and traumatized by Takahata when he worked for him. (The Ghibli commentator Alex Dudok de Wit has said that Suzuki “kind of retracted” his comments about Takahata later on.)

The book doesn't have other shocking anecdotes on that level. However, Denison finds evidence in animators' public comments that working at Ghibli was relentlessly pressured, with animators typically working all night and on public holidays. Kōji Morimoto, beloved by many sakuga fans, recalls feeling lost and confused animating the "everyday drama" of Kiki's Delivery Service (pictured left); he would have preferred an action film like Laputa. For Makiko Futaki, another elite animator, the challenge of Kiki was that “there is only one correct interpretation of the storyboards drawn by Miyazaki. How the shots must be executed is pretty much already decided in Miyazaki's mind…”

As Denison notes, this comment could be taken to imply “staff working towards a single authorial creator's 'vision.'” This idea is often assumed in mainstream writing about animated films, although sakuga fandom works hard to challenge it. Denison herself quotes another Ghibli legend, the art director and background artist Kazuo Oga, saying that he rejected Miyazaki's advice to draw things over and over. “I'm someone who doesn't want to draw too much,” Oga laughed, saying that instead he just draws as precisely as he can.

Other comments suggest artists putting themselves into their work. Character designer Katsuya Kondō said that Kiki "feels as I do," including in Kiki's depressed moments. Futaki may have talked of the “one correct interpretation” of Miyazaki's storyboard, but she also animated the safflower picking in Takahata's Only Yesterday (pictured right), which she said came from her childhood memories of picking flowers. (Futaki filmed real safflower pickers, but her tape went wrong, hence her relying on her memories.) Only Yesterday was helmed by Takahata, who famously did not draw – he delegated the film's storyboards to Yoshiyuki Momose - which surely gave artists such as Futaki more creative freedom when they worked on it.

Or at least that's an obvious conclusion that we outside Ghibli are led to, or guided to. Denison emphasizes that most of the quotes that she cites are taken from the studio's own publicity and art books. That's not to suggest they're false, but they're framed by marketing agendas. For example, Only Yesterday was publicized as a film especially “aligned” with the experiences of modern working women, such as Futaki.

The experience of work is one of the strongest running themes in Ghibli's films. It's represented in everything from Only Yesterday's safflower-picking and the home-building in Grave of the Fireflies – one of that film's few joyous sequences – through to the witch's energetic entrepreneurship in Kiki's Delivery Service, set against Ursula's happy life alone as a painter in the woods. In light of Futaki's earlier comment about working on Kiki, there's an irony in Ursula's line in that film about learning to draw your own pictures, not imitating someone else's.

Porco Rosso (pictured left) depicts an “ideal” workplace – Piccolo's factory, where the titular pilot (often seen as a stand-in for Miyazaki) – sees his new plane created by an army of industrious women and girls. Denison points out, though, that Ghibli's promotion of the film was cringe-worthy. Its cinema program boasted that Porco Rosso had been made by “an army of a beautiful woman.”

Similarly, a production report on Totoro described the producer Eiko Tanaka as shouldering burdens and being “a triple threat warrior: vigorous, cheerful and beautiful.” Denison notes, “Tanaka's production work is masculinized (she is a warrior who shoulders burdens) but simultaneously she is sexualized (beautiful) and made to perform her production role in a service industry mode (cheerfully)”. She's both elevated yet framed in “reductive, almost anti-feminist ways.” Tanaka would go on to co-found STUDIO4°C, over which she's presided for nearly forty years.

Porco Rosso promoted itself as a film where many of the most significant roles were taken by women. But Denison finds alternative perspectives here too. You could see the film's production credits as a feminist statement, but you could also see them as a publicity stunt to tie in with the film's self-marketing. Moreover, as Miyazaki himself noted, the “main” Ghibli staff at the time were all employed on Only Yesterday. Most glaringly, Porco Rosso's writer-director was still a man, as is the case in all Ghibli's output.

In Denison's research, she never found a Ghibli female director “for feature films, short films, music videos, or even advertisements.” That puts Ghibli well behind not just Kyoto Animation or Science SARU but also Disney Animation, Pixar, and DreamWorks Animation which are frequently framed as being less progressive than the home of San, Kiki, and Chihiro.

Denison's chapter on Ghibli's CG and effects animation complicates the myths about Ghibli as a handcrafted studio, resisting the onslaught of digital technology. These myths are encapsulated in the much-memed video clip of Miyazaki ranting about A.I. zombies being “an insult to life itself.” Miyazaki was never as much of an animation purist as that clip suggests. Even the proto-Ghibli Nausicaä was pushing “against the possibilities of the cel animation mode of production." In the film, the giant Ohmu insects were celluloid cut-outs on sliding mechanisms, as much stop-motion puppets as drawings.

Reportedly, Miyazaki himself asked for a worm-covered monster (tatiragami) to be made in CG for Princess Mononoke. Meanwhile, Isao Takahata was striving to use CG to erase the differences between backgrounds and foregrounds in his new film. Ironically, he wanted to build on the craft of the great Canadian animator Frédéric Back (The Man Who Planted Trees), who had never needed CG. The result was My Neighbors the Yamadas, one of the most laborious Ghibli films to make and one of the least commercially successful.

At the very least, though, no one could accuse Yamadas of looking like a wannabe Hollywood CG film. That was the charge laid by angry critics slamming Ghibli's most recent film as of writing, Earwig and the Witch (pictured right). Widely seen as a disastrous failed experiment, it seemed to announce the end of a studio that had never found a successor to Miyazaki. The succession issue is the subject of one of Denison's last chapters where she lays much blame on Miyazaki himself, "both his studio's biggest star and a roadblock in the progress of animators through the system to director status."

Today, Ghibli appears to be dying, at least as a maker of animation that can blow new breezes through the industry, as the studio's myth-making puts it. But it's also quite possible that Ghibli could go out with a bang, producing a last blockbuster in Miyazaki's much-anticipated film How Do You Live?, which will be released in Japan this July. Chalk it up as one more paradox from Japan's most paradoxical studio.