The Sacred Ordinary: Studio Ghibli and the Ritual of Coming Home

Published on September 20, 2026
By Moises Carrasco

Every evening when we get home, without ceremony, we perform a small rite. We arrive at a door, we open it, and we step through into a space that belongs to us in a way no other space does. It is such a mundane act that we rarely notice it has a structure at all, and yet philosophers and anthropologists have written entire books describing these psychological structures. Interestingly, visual works such as the animated worlds of Studio Ghibli seem to reflect this dynamic to create worlds which contain architecture and layouts that provide a path to escape by tapping into our memories in a legible yet enchanted form.

This profound psychological weight of living spaces was famously explored by philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who coined the discipline of "topoanalysis"—the study of the localized psychological life of a home. According to Bachelard, the corners, stairs, and attics of the home we grew up in are not neutral backdrops, but are physically inscribed in us. The stair that was an inch too high, or the particular quality of light in a childhood bedroom, become part of the body’s memory, carried forward into every space we inhabit in later stages of our lives. This space that has been "loved" and provides a protective psychological value becomes almost sacred to us, a concept he defined as a "felicitous space."

In Bachelard’s account, felicitous space is already shadowed by nostalgia, so that every house we inhabit later becomes an attempt to recover the first house that can never quite be returned to. In that context, the house we live in is never simply a shelter. It is where physical reality and what he calls the virtuality of imagination and dream converge, forming a little cosmos and safe space built from the layers of our past experiences and the dreams of everyone who has lived there before. To understand this idea further, we can look to the work of Finnish architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa. For Pallasmaa, we do not live separately in material and mental worlds; rather, these dimensions are deeply and inextricably intertwined.

As Pallasmaa famously noted, architectural constructions are built in the world of matter and Euclidean geometry, but lived space always transcends the rules of physics and geometry. This idea that a house holds an imagined mental world alongside its physical one is not an abstraction if you have seen Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro. When the two protagonist sisters arrive at their new, yet well-lived, home, they are told the spaces are full of small soot spirits that scatter when a room is disturbed. The spirits in this context are not intruders; they are what an empty house is already imagined to contain before any memories have had time to accumulate there. The movie is dramatizing, almost literally, what Bachelard described: a house is never just physical space waiting to be filled. It arrives already half-inhabited by what we expect and hope to find in it.

In that sense, if the house is where interior life and physical space converge, then crossing into it is not architecturally neutral either. Instead, it becomes more of what anthropologist Arnold van Gennep describes as a rite of passage, which according to his foundational writings unfolds in three distinct stages: separation from a prior state, a liminal or threshold stage of transition, and incorporation into the new state. While van Gennep was not writing about coming home from work at the end of a long day, the structural sequence maps cleanly onto the daily experience.

Standing at your own front door is a small rite of separation, where the outside world demands a stop. Then, opening the door and stepping across the threshold is the liminal moment itself; it is the brief and rarely noticed moment where people transition from the profane world of labor and public life into their own sacred domain. Finally, settling into the core of the home—like sinking into a favorite chair, entering a specific room, or performing the ritual of taking off shoes and setting down a bag—is incorporation, the return to the self or the miniature cosmos that only exists in that space.

The door, in this reading, is not simply an architectural feature, but rather a portal. As magical or esoteric as this might sound, cultures have marked such portals for centuries through ritual architecture. In Japan, for example, a Shinto Torii gate announces visually, long before anyone crosses it, that the space beyond is no longer profane. The physical threshold is doing symbolic work the moment it comes into view.

Studio Ghibli’s cinematic masterpieces seem not just to gesture at this ritualistic structure, but rather build entire narratives out of it. In Spirited Away, the main character Chihiro crosses a bridge to transition into a world of spirits dominated by a massive bathhouse, with the film developing structurally around her gradual incorporation into this alternate realm. The bathhouse itself tracks her personal growth, only revealing and presenting its spaces progressively as Chihiro matures and adapts. Similarly, in Howl’s Moving Castle, the protagonist Sophie enters through a magic threshold into the mechanical castle. The interior space acts as a physical manifestation of the inner world of the wizard Howl. As Sophie cleans and cares for the space, she actively incorporates herself into this new, shifting reality. In both films, the characters remain suspended in this in-between condition—a liminal space where they are not fully anchored in their old reality, but not yet completely immersed in their new one either.

However, contemporary living arrangements often work against these psychological needs. Modern apartments featuring open-plan layouts or monospaces frequently create undifferentiated rooms, causing the traditional rite of entry to become diffused and diluted. The rise of hybrid work, for instance, drags the demands, anxieties, and digital tethers of the exterior world across the very physical threshold that used to demarcate their end. Furthermore, homes showcased across social media tend to be staged so they are easily legible to strangers, prioritizing visual performance over the accumulated, idiosyncratic memory that makes a space truly felicitous in the first place. Interestingly, Bachelard was already lamenting this trajectory back in 1958, warning that in the modern city "there are no houses," but only inhabitants living in superimposed boxes.

Beyond architectural layouts, Ghibli’s films offer another vital opportunity to escape our fast-paced lives by immersing viewers in moments of stillness amid fantastical yet deeply grounded environments. Once viewers are incorporated into their cinematic worlds, directors like Hayao Miyazaki dedicate entire, unhurried scenes to silence. In Spirited Away, a famous shot lingers for roughly four minutes on Chihiro sitting quietly in a train with no dialogue whatsoever. In Howl’s Moving Castle, the film devotes a full minute to Sophie sitting in front of a flickering fire, with the camera emphasizing the tactile architectural details of the large fireplace and the half-lit room surrounding her.

Cultural critic Susan Napier, in her comprehensive work Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art, identifies this characteristic in the films with the traditional Japanese aesthetic concept of mono no aware—a gentle, empathetic awareness of the transience of ordinary moments, which are valued precisely because they do not last.

As we navigate an era where our built environments and cultural expectations increasingly encourage a productivity-oriented lifestyle, these quiet cinematic moments and the films’ careful representations of spatial rites allow audiences to escape into psychological dynamics that modern life rarely affords the time for. In a profound way, they help viewers reconnect with their own felicitous spaces. The deep nostalgia evoked by these animated worlds is no accident; it serves as a powerful reminder for architects and designers that the built environment can and should produce spaces worth loving and returning to every evening. While a house cannot magically grant anyone more hours in a day, it can be built and arranged, deliberately and thoughtfully, to hold that essential kind of stillness.