A former reporter for the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun, where early in his career he covered stories on the Ghibli animation studios, it seems highly unlikely that Kenichi Yoda (born 1974) imagined he would one day go on to head the company he had focused on as a culture journalist.
His rise to the summit of the legendary temple of animated cinema came on 22 June, when he took over the presidency from Hiroyuki Fukuda. His interview with 'Euronews' takes place 48 hours before he accepts, on behalf of his studio, the 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.
The ideas of two of its creators, the late Isao Takahata and his colleague Hayao Miyazaki, together with the work of the roughly 200 people employed by the company, remain one of the main gateways into Japanese culture for millions of people around the globe.
That was the case with 'Marco' and 'Heidi' in Spain. The anime series were broadcast between the final throes of Francoism and the Transition to democracy, at a time when Ghibli had not even been conceived by this pair of film-makers, who met in a trade union while both were working at the Toei Doga studio in the 1960s. Those series were probably, with the exception of landmarks such as Akira Kurosawa's films, the first contact an entire generation of Spaniards had with the Land of the Rising Sun.
Yoda laughs when asked whether they see themselves as a tool of soft diplomacy or Japanese 'soft power'. "I think each work exists only because its directors and animators devoted themselves to it with care. We are very happy that, as a result, people all over the world watch it. But we are not doing it for diplomacy," the president says.
Ghibli and the terrible beauty of war
In 2026 it is inevitable to ask Yoda about one of the themes that most often recurs, alongside environmental protection, friendship or the strength of his female characters, in the scripts produced by his studio: armed conflict.
Takahata, a communist sympathiser, was an outspoken defender of Article 9 of his country's constitution and a convinced pacifist, whereas Miyazaki imbibed war from childhood: his family's company manufactured parts for military aircraft on the fascist side in the Second World War.
Both men bear witness to this obsession in animation classics such as 'Grave of the Fireflies', through 'Princess Mononoke' and 'Howl's Moving Castle', and up to 'The Wind Rises'. Is it still possible today, in a Japan allocating unprecedented shares of its GDP to its Self-Defence Forces and a Defence White Paper championed by far-right politician Sanae Takaichi, to go on making pacifist films?
Yoda sidesteps the issue with finesse. "How to address war is a very important topic for Studio Ghibli. Of course, it is better if there are no wars. But what I find admirable about Miyazaki as a director is that he too has been fascinated by the weapons used in war, or by fighter planes, by their beauty as objects, as forms. Of course, he has not the slightest sympathy for war. But there is in him a feeling he cannot resist: the attraction of those things as objects. And that is, in a way, something very human," he argues.
We also ask him about one of the studio's most quoted lines, spoken by the lead in 'Porco Rosso' (1992), in which he pronounces in a cinema that he would rather be a pig than a fascist. Would a line like that fit into a contemporary script room, whether at Ghibli or another studio? Once again, the executive chooses to dodge the question: he says he is very pleased that one of Emmanuel Macron's favourite films (recalling a statement the French president made during an official visit to Japan) is 'Porco Rosso', according to the interviewee.
The question of artificial intelligence also hangs over the Covadonga room at the Reconquista Hotel, where the Princess of Asturias Foundation traditionally lodges its laureates. It surfaces in connection with the famous viral clip of Miyazaki (source in Spanish) from 2016, in which he cuts down two developers from another company when they try to sell the genius a kind of proto-AI to be used in his drawings. "It is an insult to life itself," he snaps at them.
"Ten years on, in every interview without fail I am asked what Studio Ghibli thinks about AI," Yoda explains with resignation. "It is very difficult to predict how it will evolve, and I think we are all living in that uncertainty. But if there is something we can say right now, and I say this also in a personal capacity, it is this. Imagine two restaurants: one where the food is made by an AI and another where it is made by people. I would undoubtedly choose the second."
His team signals that we should end the interview, but the former journalist tells us he wants to add one last point. "Listening to your questions, I have realised that Ghibli is very closely bound up with its time (...) We debate every day what the studio can do in this era and what kind of era we are living in. In that sense, I have the feeling that we are creating something with restraint," he says.
"There is great honesty towards the act of artistic creation," he continues. "It is not a business plan: it is about thinking seriously about what response the studio gives to its time. That is now the studio's day-to-day reality. And it has probably always been that way." The next decade will show whether, after Miyazaki's generational handover, still active at 85, the emblematic studio manages to maintain its creative independence and ideals, having captivated millions of children and adults far beyond the Japanese islands.