If you've seen one Miyazaki film and want to know where to go next, this is your map. We ranked every Hayao Miyazaki-directed feature in our catalog from top to bottom, with a quick word on what makes each one worth your time.
The Short Version: Miyazaki Is the Reason People Stop Being Scared of Subtitles
These films are not hard watches. They move, they feel, they land emotionally whether you're eight or forty-five. The subtitles stop mattering about ten minutes in because the visuals are doing half the storytelling anyway.
Every film below is directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli unless noted. All have confirmed English subtitle options.
#1: Spirited Away (2001)
A ten-year-old girl gets trapped in a spirit world and has to work her way out. It is the most confident, fully realized film in this catalog, and the one to start with if you've never seen Miyazaki.
This is the consensus pick for a reason. The world-building is relentless, the emotional stakes are real, and the ending earns every bit of its weight. If someone asks you what foreign animation can do that Hollywood can't, you show them this.
#2: Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
A young woman is cursed into old age and finds refuge with a vain wizard in a mechanical castle. It's messy in the best way, ambitious, and genuinely romantic in a way most American films aren't anymore.
Some people rank this above Spirited Away. The romance is more front and center, and the anti-war undertones hit differently as you get older. The castle design alone is worth watching this twice.
#3: Princess Mononoke (1997)
A warrior prince gets caught between an industrial human settlement and the gods of the forest fighting to survive. This one has actual violence and a genuine moral complexity that most animated films won't touch.
This is the one for people who like their Miyazaki a little darker. There are no clean villains here. Everyone has a point. The environmental conflict at the center still feels urgent, which is saying something for a film from 1997.
#4: My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Two sisters move to the countryside and discover a giant woodland spirit living nearby. This is the gentle one, the one you watch with kids, the one that reminds you what wonder felt like before irony got to everything.
At 86 minutes, this asks almost nothing from you and gives a lot back. It has no real antagonist. The conflict is small and human. That is a harder thing to pull off than it looks.
#5: Castle in the Sky (1986)
A boy and a girl chase a legendary floating island while pirates and government agents chase them. This is Miyazaki's most purely fun film, a straight adventure with great momentum and no pretension.
If someone in your house is resistant to subtitles because they want action, not art, start here. It moves like a Saturday matinee. The floating city reveal is one of the best single images in his catalog.
#6: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
A young princess in a post-apocalyptic world tries to prevent war between human kingdoms while giant insects overrun the land. Technically pre-Ghibli, but it's the film that made Ghibli possible and it shows every bit of that ambition.
This film is 41 years old and the world it builds still feels original. Nausicaä herself is one of the great action-hero protagonists in animation, full stop. The ecological themes run even deeper here than in Mononoke.
#7: Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
A teenage witch strikes out on her own and builds a delivery business in a new city, while quietly losing confidence in her abilities. A small, warm film about creative burnout that sneaks up on you.
This one tends to get underrated because it's so calm. But the subplot about losing your gift when you overthink it is something adults feel in their chest in a way kids don't entirely catch yet. Worth a rewatch if you saw it young.
#8: Ponyo (2008)
A goldfish princess escapes the ocean and bonds with a five-year-old boy on the shore. The most purely childlike film Miyazaki ever made, with deliberately simple animation that feels hand-painted.
This is the best entry point for very young kids. The story operates on a toddler's logic, which is not a criticism. Miyazaki made a conscious choice to draw from a five-year-old's perspective and the warmth of that decision comes through in every frame.
#9: Porco Rosso (1992)
A WWI flying ace who has been cursed into the form of a pig runs a freelance bounty-hunting operation over the Adriatic Sea. The most personal and oddly melancholic film on this list.
Miyazaki has said this film is about himself and the compromises of middle age. Whether or not that lands for you, the flying sequences are some of the best in animation anywhere, and the setting (interwar Italy) is completely unlike anything else in his catalog.
#10: The Wind Rises (2013)
A fictionalized biography of the engineer who designed Japan's most famous WWII fighter plane, told as a dreamlike meditation on passion, beauty, and moral cost. Miyazaki's final film before his first retirement.
This one is for adults. It is slower, sadder, and more ambiguous than anything else here. The central question, whether you can love the beautiful thing you made even if it becomes a weapon, does not get a clean answer. That is the point.
#11: The Boy and the Heron (2023)
A grieving boy follows a mysterious heron into a strange underworld built from books and memory. Miyazaki's return from retirement, and the most deliberately strange, personal film he's made since Porco Rosso.
This one divided people. It is not trying to be Spirited Away again. It is wilder, less explained, and much more interested in grief than in adventure. Give it patience and it gives you something genuinely unusual in return.
One More Worth Knowing: The Castle of Cagliostro
Miyazaki's feature directing debut, a Lupin III caper involving a master thief, a kidnapped princess, and a forger's conspiracy. Pure action-comedy with none of the ecological weight of his later work, just tight, inventive fun.
This is the odd one out. No nature spirits, no young girl finding her footing, no environmental anxiety. It is a straight heist-adventure and it remains enormously watchable because Miyazaki's instinct for movement and pacing was already fully formed in 1979.
Where to Go After You've Seen Them All
If you've worked through the full Miyazaki catalog and want more animated films with similar qualities, there are other Studio Ghibli films here not directed by Miyazaki himself. From Up on Poppy Hill (2011, ★ 7.5), directed by his son Goro Miyazaki, is a quiet, lovely film about memory and teenage life in 1960s Yokohama. It shares the studio's visual sensibility and its patience with small emotional details.
If you want something with bigger stakes and more spectacle from the Ghibli world, Tales from Earthsea (2006, ★ 6.5) is also a Goro Miyazaki film, and while it is the most criticized entry in the studio's catalog, it has visual moments that still impress.
Ready to find your next film without scrolling blindly? Use ReelBridge to match any film you already love to something from this catalog that nails the same feeling, with every subtitle and streaming source confirmed before you commit.