Opinion | Studio Ghibli And Snow White: Why Japan, Korea Best The West In Pop Culture
The West's influence, once wielded by Disney's Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, is in decline. It is because American and European studios have been concerning themselves too much with culture wars, albeit being "progressive" and woke
Two disconnected events unfolded in popular culture last week.
One was ChatGPT’s image generator offering Studio Ghibli-style portraits and recreating scenes and situations. The other was the cinematic release of a remake of Snow White.
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The images, inspired by the style of the legendary co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, became a global craze within hours. Everyone’s timeline was flooded, everyone and their aunts were discovering Miyazaki and anime.
Snow White, on the other hand, tanked spectacularly. Critics gave it 44 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. But at the box office, at least according to initial figures, Snow White brought in $87 million in its opening weekend globally, with just $43 million domestically.
If one compares it with other Disney movies, The Lion King did $191 million domestically, Beauty and the Beast $174 million, Alice in Wonderland $116 million, and The Jungle Book $103 million in the same period.
One of biggest reasons attributed to Snow White’s bombing at the collection is its insistent wokeness and the pro-Palestine, anti-white utterances of its lead actor, Rachel Zegler. Jonah Platt, son of Snow White producer Marc Platt, publicly blamed Zegler for the Disney remake’s weak box office collection, accusing her of “narcissism" and dragging “personal politics" into its promotion.
“Yeah, my dad, the producer of enormous piece of Disney IP with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, had to leave his family to fly across the country to reprimand his 20-year-old employee for dragging her personal politics into the middle of promoting the movie for which she signed a multi-million dollar contract to get paid and do publicity for. This is called adult responsibility and accountability. And her actions clearly hurt the film’s box office," Platt, 38, said in a now-deleted Instagram post. “Free speech does not mean you’re allowed to say whatever you want in your private employment without repercussions. Tens of thousands of people worked on that film and she hijacked the conversation for her own immature desires at the risk of all the colleagues and crew and blue collar workers who depend on that movie to be successful. Narcissism is not something to be coddled or encouraged."
The Studio Ghibli craze is not without its controversies. The trend falls in the grey area of copyright. While style is not explicitly protected by copyright laws, it is likely that OpenAI trained its model on the creative works of the Japanese studio.
“I think this raises the same question that we’ve been asking ourselves for a couple years now. What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?" Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the US-based law firm Neal & McDevitt, told TechCrunch.
Also, Miyazaki fans have expressed their anger and disapproval of reducing painstaking art into cheap memes. A video from 2016 has resurfaced in which Miyazaki himself is seen lashing out during an AI demonstration from staff. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself," he is heard saying in the video.
Since this utter garbage is trending, we should take a look at what Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli, said about machine created art. https://t.co/1TMPcFGIJE pic.twitter.com/IvaM9WZL3T— Nuberodesign (@nuberodesign) March 26, 2025
But these concerns serve to reinforce the wild popularity of Southeast Asian pop culture creations – whether it is Japanese manga and anime or Korean pop, TV dramas, or street fashion.
The West’s influence, once wielded by Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, is in decline.
It is because the American and European studios have been concerning themselves too much with culture wars, albeit being “progressive" and woke. Considering that the US deep state had been routing massive USAID funds for a transgender opera in Colombia and a transgender comic book in Peru, there could well be much monetary incentive for this politicisation of pop culture.
But youngsters are rejecting it.
When Disney fired popular Star Wars star Gina Carano for refusing to support movements and ideologies like Black Lives Matter, Covid lockdowns, and sharing pronouns, social media users trended #CancelDisneyPlus. Conservative anti-woke journalist Christopher Rufo in 2022 revealed an internal Disney emergency meeting where company officials discussed “adding queerness" and LGBTQ+ agenda to its children’s programming, and promoting gender-neutral language at Disney theme parks.
In contrast, Japanese Marie Kondo was decluttering our lives in her Netflix hit Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. South Korean pop groups BTS and Blackpink made music videos action-packed. Parasite became the first South Korean film to win a Palme d’Or.
Korean movies experimented with themes of immense variety and lateral thinking, but steered clear of wokeness and culture wars. Same with Japanese anime.
Childhood and adolescence in southeast Asian content was not being contaminated by political goals of ‘liberal’ white women with coloured hair sitting in New York or Paris, thrusting race and gender down the audience’s collective throats.
Recently, Japan outraged against the latest version of the video game, Assassin’s Creed, made in France, which showed a black ninja smashing stuff around inside a Shinto temple.
Creativity cannot be a prisoner of political concepts and notions of correctness. It must flow like a mountain brook, not through well-laid pipelines. As long as the West does not realise this, its influence and relevance will keep ebbing.
(Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views)
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