ABSTRACT
Miyazaki Hayao has built an extensive and elaborate world through his animated feature films and broader media work done through Studio Ghibli, the commercially and critically acclaimed animation studio he co-founded in 1985. Studio Ghibli has produced many of Japan's highest-grossing films: Kiki's Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso, and Pom Poko, and Spirited Away. Thematically, Studio Ghibli films, and in particular those of Miyazaki, have been praised for their engagement with environmentalism and depictions of the destructiveness of war, as exemplified in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Within the category of officially sanctioned sites is the Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. Yet reports of fans immersing themselves in "Ghibli's Australia" continue to spread. For example, in 2007 Japanese actor and celebrity Hidehiko Ishizuka visited Tasmania's Ross Bakery dressed as the cat Jiji from Kiki's Delivery Service for the Japanese television travel special Ishi-chan's Comic Travelogue of the Animal Kingdom: Journeying 1000 km to the Southern Paradise of Tasmania.
