I don’t share your concerns about simulacra or cheapening, because in this case, the style is the substance. It’s not just a cosmetic overlay; it fundamentally alters how we perceive and emotionally engage with a scene. And at any rate, the Ghibli aesthetic is too coherent, too complete in its internal logic, to be diminished by misuse or overuse. People can wear it wrong, but they can’t break it.
What’s especially interesting to me right now is that I’ve gained the ability you refer to as “Miyazaki goggles.” Today, for example, I was repeatedly able to briefly summon that warm, quiet beauty while looking at my environment. And when I was with a close relative who seemed slightly frail, the moment I mentally applied the Ghibli filter, I instantly teared up and had a huge emotional reaction. A minute later I tried again, and the same thing happened.
Repeated exposure to the reality transfer seems to teach you a new language, one that lets you do new things. After seeing so many A-to-B examples of Ghiblification, I have learned a heuristic for what photorealism could feel like under that lens, and can now easily switch to it. It’s not that I vividly visualize everything in Ghibli style, but I do vividly experience the value shift it brings. At most I might see Ghibli very faintly superimposed, abstractly even, but I can predict the vectors of what would change, and those shifts immediately alter my emotional reading of the scene. So perhaps over time, the Ghibli reality transfer will help us become more sensitive, appreciative, compassionate and easily able to expand our circle of concern. One caveat: I work with images constantly and have for a long time, so I might already have been more adept at mental visual transformation than most people.
Related to this idea of “learning a new language that lets you do new things,” I’ve also been wanting to share something cool I trained myself to do: I wore an eyepatch over one eye and just went about daily life like that, switching eyes a couple times a day. And after a week or two, I started being able to perceive depth on a 2D screen. As long as one of my eyes is covered while I watch a movie, I can actually perceive the 3D, especially when there are strong depth cues like a moving camera or shallow focus. It’s like my brain learned to estimate depth when binocular vision was disabled by predicting what the other eye would’ve contributed. Again, maybe I only pulled this off because I work with images a lot.
You’re likely right – my ability to mentally apply the “Miyazaki goggles” and feel the value shift is probably not what’s happening for most people, or even many.
For me, it’s probably a combination of factors: my background working extensively with images, the conceptual pathways formed during writing the original post above, and preexisting familiarity with the aesthetic from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Tales from Earthsea, Ponyo, and Arrietty.
But crucially, I share your optimism about the potential. I do think this is a skill others could cultivate with deliberate practice. Now that we’ve seen this kind of reality transfer is possible, perhaps methods and best practices could eventually be developed and tested to guide that learning.