This week, everyone I know turned themselves into a Studio Ghibli character. My feed was wall-to-wall watercolor dreamscapes: friends as Miyazaki protagonists, pets as forest spirits, Portland's skyline reimagined as a scene from Spirited Away. I did it too, because I'm not made of stone and Truffles looked absolutely perfect as a catbus companion.
This week, everyone I know turned themselves into a Studio Ghibli character.
And then the discourse arrived. Is this disrespectful to Miyazaki's artistry? Is it theft? Is it homage? Is it just fun? And underneath all of that, the question I can't stop turning over: what does it mean when the most "authentic" version of ourselves we share online is a literally artificial rendering?
Here's what I think is happening, from a brand strategy lens. The Ghibli filter went viral not because it was technically impressive (though it is), and not just because it was aesthetically beautiful (though it is that too). It went viral because it solved a problem people didn't know they had: the exhaustion of performing authenticity online.
For years, we've been told that brands and individuals alike should be "authentic" on social media. Show your real self. Be vulnerable. No filters. But that mandate became its own performance. Carefully curated "rawness." Strategically messy hair. The "no makeup" photo that took forty takes. Authenticity became a genre, and genres get stale.
The Ghibli filter offered an escape hatch. Here's a way to share myself that's obviously, transparently not real, and therefore weirdly more honest. I'm not pretending this is candid. I'm not performing authenticity. I'm playing. And play, it turns out, is something we've been starved of.
For brands, this is a signal worth paying attention to. The audience isn't rejecting artifice. They're rejecting the pretense that artifice is authenticity. Give people a clearly artificial frame that lets them express something genuine, and they'll run with it.
This is why brand collaborations with AI art tools could actually work, if done with self-awareness and joy rather than the grim corporate necessity of "we need an AI strategy." The brands that will win in the AI-generated content era aren't the ones using AI to fake authenticity. They're the ones using AI to facilitate play.
Miyazaki himself would probably hate all of this, and that's fair. But the cultural moment reveals something true: people want permission to be artificial in ways that feel genuine. That's a paradox worth sitting with if you're building a brand in 2025.