Studio Ghibli’s Cats: What Miyazaki’s Felines Actually Mean

Studio Ghibli cats are everywhere in the studio’s catalogue, and almost none of them are decoration. A cat carries a girl through a forest at night. A cat stops talking and the film treats it as a graduation. A cat in a top hat walks out of one movie and headlines another one seven years later. The animals are doing structural work, and the folklore behind them is older than the studio by several centuries.

There is also a persistent credit problem. Two of the most cat-heavy films in the Ghibli library were not directed by Hayao Miyazaki, and the internet keeps giving him the credit anyway. Let us fix that first, then get to what the cats mean.

Table of Contents

• Not Every Studio Ghibli Cat Is a Miyazaki Cat
• The Catbus Is Folklore, Not Whimsy
• Jiji: The Cat Who Stops Talking
• The Baron and Muta: One Cat, Two Films, Two Directors
• Miyazaki Animated a Famous Cat Before Ghibli Existed
• The Ghibli Cat Film You Are Not Allowed to Stream
• What Studio Ghibli Cats Actually Mean
• FAQ

Not Every Studio Ghibli Cat Is a Miyazaki Cat

Studio Ghibli cats get filed under “Miyazaki” by default, and that habit erases two other directors who mattered enormously to the studio.

Whisper of the Heart was directed by Yoshifumi Kondō

Whisper of the Heart (1995) was directed by Yoshifumi Kondō, adapted from Aoi Hiiragi’s 1989 manga Mimi o Sumaseba. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay and drew the storyboards, which is where the confusion starts, but the director’s chair was Kondō’s. It was the first theatrical Ghibli feature directed by someone who was neither Miyazaki nor Isao Takahata, and it became the highest-grossing Japanese film of 1995.

It was also his only feature. Kondō died on 21 January 1998 of an aortic dissection, at 47. He had been positioned as the studio’s successor, the person meant to carry Ghibli after its two founders. His death is widely attributed to overwork, and it is generally cited as the trigger for Miyazaki’s first retirement announcement in 1998, after Princess Mononoke. The cat in that film, a fat, unimpressed tabby who rides the train and refuses to explain himself, is the last character design Kondō directed into existence.

The Cat Returns was directed by Hiroyuki Morita

The Cat Returns (2002) was directed by Hiroyuki Morita, not Miyazaki. Its origin is stranger than the credit. In 1999 Studio Ghibli got a request from a Japanese theme park for a 20-minute short starring cats. The park later cancelled. The concept survived, expanded, and arrived in Japanese cinemas on 19 July 2002 as a 75-minute feature that went on to earn around 65 million dollars worldwide and finish as the highest-grossing domestic film at the Japanese box office that year. A cancelled theme-park commission became one of the studio’s biggest hits.

The Catbus Is Folklore, Not Whimsy

Western audiences tend to read the Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro (1988) as pure invention, a sugar rush of a design. It is a grinning, twelve-legged cat with a bushy tail, hollow body, fur-lined seats and glowing mice for headlights. Naoki Tatsuta voiced it in Japanese; Frank Welker and Carl Macek have both handled it in English versions.

None of that is arbitrary. The Nekobasu sits on top of two established yōkai. The bakeneko is a supernatural cat with a single tail whose legends multiply during the Edo period (1603 to 1868), when cats were kept in large numbers to protect silkworm stocks from rodents. Living close to humans and living long, they picked up a reputation for transformation. The nekomata is the related creature with a forked or multiple tail, split between mountain-dwelling ones and household cats that grew old enough to turn.

Twelve legs and a grin

Read through that lens, the Catbus is an old cat that has aged into something else, which is exactly what a nekomata is supposed to be. It appears when children are lost or frightened, it moves through territory that adults cannot see, and it never explains itself. That is the folkloric job description, transposed onto a 1950s rural bus route. If you want the wider global version of this, cats being assigned supernatural duty across cultures, we traced it in the history of black cat superstitions.

One small bonus for the taxonomy nerds: a velvet worm species described in 2013 was named Eoperipatus totoro, because its soft, many-legged body reminded the describing scientists of the Catbus. A yōkai bus has a legally valid Latin binomial attached to it.

Jiji: The Cat Who Stops Talking

In Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), directed by Miyazaki, the black cat Jiji talks. Rei Sakuma voiced him in Japanese. Then, after Kiki burns out and loses her flying, she loses Jiji’s voice too, and in the original Japanese cut she never gets it back.

People have read this as tragedy for thirty-odd years. Miyazaki’s own account points elsewhere. He has said that Jiji “represents an immature part of her”, and described noticing how odd the cat seemed whenever he was assertive, because he was never independent to begin with. Under that reading, Kiki was never a witch chatting with her familiar. She was a kid talking to her own inner voice, out loud, because she had not yet learned to hold a conversation with herself. When the voice goes quiet, the film is not punishing her. It is telling you she has grown up and no longer needs the narration.

What the Disney dub changed

The 1998 Disney English dub cast Phil Hartman as Jiji and quietly rewrote the point. Hartman’s Jiji is sarcastic and wisecracking, with lines added in places where the original cat says nothing at all. Dubbing rebuilds a film’s entire sound layer, in the same way that Foley artists rebuild every footstep and rustle, and every rebuild is a set of choices. At the end, the dub has him say “Kiki, can you hear me?” before jumping onto her shoulder, implying the connection was restored. That single line inverts the ending: growth becomes loss reversed, and the whole arc softens.

Later Disney releases pulled most of the ad-libs back toward the Japanese script. Hartman’s performance is also a grim footnote in dub history. It was his final role, and the dub premiered five days before he was murdered on 28 May 1998. Subsequent releases carry a dedication to him.

The Baron and Muta: One Cat, Two Films, Two Directors

The most interesting cat lineage at Ghibli runs across seven years and two directors. In Whisper of the Heart, Shizuku follows a large tabby off a train and ends up at an antique shop, where a cat figurine in a suit and top hat becomes the seed of the story she writes. That figurine is Baron Humbert von Gikkingen.

In The Cat Returns, Morita takes the same Baron and gives him a whole film. Here he is alive, running the Cat Bureau, and voiced by Yoshihiko Hakamada in Japanese and Cary Elwes in English. The heavy tabby from the train reappears as Muta, formally Renaldo Moon, voiced by Tetsu Watanabe and Peter Boyle. The protagonist Haru Yoshioka, who can hear cats speak, saves a cat from a truck, learns it was Prince Lune, and gets rewarded with catnip, mice, and an engagement to a cat she has never met.

The English cast is a period piece of its own: Anne Hathaway as Haru, Tim Curry as the Cat King, Andrew Bevis as Lune. On the Japanese side, the Cat King was Tetsurō Tanba and Haru was Chizuru Ikewaki. The source material is Aoi Hiiragi’s manga Baron, so both films trace back to the same author, one adapted directly, one adapted sideways.

What makes the pair worth watching back to back is the register shift. Kondō’s film is grounded realism about a teenager deciding whether she can write. Morita’s is portal fantasy with a wedding threat. The cat is the hinge between them, and the story only works because a figurine on a shelf in one film has enough presence to open a door in the next. It is the same trick that magical realism uses when it lets an ordinary object stay ordinary and be impossible at the same time.

Miyazaki Animated a Famous Cat Before Ghibli Existed

Long before Ghibli was founded in 1985, Miyazaki was a key animator at Toei Animation on Nagagutsu o Haita Neko (1969), released in English as The Wonderful World of Puss ‘n Boots, directed by Kimio Yabuki with Yasuji Mori as animation director. The film’s best-remembered sequence is a chase across castle rooftops animated in alternating cuts by Yasuo Ōtsuka and Miyazaki. Miyazaki also drew the manga adaptation, serialised in the Sunday edition of the Chūnichi Shinbun.

The cat in that film, Pero, is still the mascot of Toei Animation today. So a 28-year-old Miyazaki spent part of 1969 animating a cat that is now a corporate logo at a rival studio, decades before he made a cat into a bus.

The Ghibli Cat Film You Are Not Allowed to Stream

Mei and the Kittenbus (2002) is a 13-minute short directed by Miyazaki and the first direct sequel Ghibli ever made to one of its own films. Four-year-old Mei Kusakabe from Totoro meets a tiny Kittenbus that blows into her house on a windy day, and is taken on a night ride into a world full of other Totoros and other Catbuses. Joe Hisaishi scored it.

You cannot legally watch it at home. It is one of the shorts made exclusively for the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, and the only ways to see it are a visit there or to Ghibli Park in Nagakute. No disc, no streaming, no download. In an era where everything leaks into a catalogue somewhere, Ghibli has kept a Miyazaki-directed Totoro sequel behind a physical ticket for more than twenty years, and the scarcity is entirely deliberate. It is a very wabi-sabi decision: the thing is worth more because you cannot keep it.

What Studio Ghibli Cats Actually Mean

Line them up and a pattern shows. Studio Ghibli cats are threshold animals. They appear at the exact point where a character has to cross from one state into another, and they carry the crossing.

• Catbus: crosses the boundary between the visible world and the one only Satsuki and Mei can reach, at the moment the family is closest to breaking.
• Jiji: crosses Kiki from childhood into adulthood, and marks the transition by going silent rather than by speaking.
• Muta: literally leads Shizuku off a train and into the antique shop where she becomes a writer.
• The Baron: crosses media, from figurine to fiction to feature film, and drags a whole spin-off with him.
• Pero: crosses studios, from a 1969 Toei feature into a permanent corporate mascot.

This is not a Ghibli invention. It is the yōkai role. Bakeneko and nekomata belong to the class of creatures that occupy the edge between ordinary life and everything else, which is roughly the same job cats have held in most human cultures that kept them indoors. Ghibli simply refused to make the edge scary. Where German Expressionism would light the same creature to threaten you, Miyazaki lights it to reassure you and keeps the strangeness fully intact underneath. The Catbus has a manic grin and twelve legs and is unambiguously safe, and both facts are true at once.

It also explains why the cats rarely get an origin. Nobody in Totoro asks where the Catbus is garaged. Nobody in Kiki explains why witches’ cats can speak. Explanation would turn a threshold into a mechanism, and the films are not interested in mechanisms. They are interested in the moment you step through. Modern cinema still knows the trick, as the Cannes-winning student short built entirely around a cat and a red dot demonstrated in 2026.

FAQ

Did Hayao Miyazaki direct The Cat Returns?

No. The Cat Returns (2002) was directed by Hiroyuki Morita. Miyazaki was not the director, and the project began as a cancelled 20-minute short commissioned by a Japanese theme park in 1999.

Why does Jiji stop talking in Kiki’s Delivery Service?

Because Kiki grows up. Miyazaki has described Jiji as representing an immature part of Kiki rather than an independent character, so the silence marks maturity, not punishment. The original Japanese ending keeps him silent. The 1998 Disney dub added a final line that implies the connection returns.

What is the Catbus based on?

Japanese cat yōkai. The bakeneko is a supernatural cat with one tail whose legends spread during the Edo period, and the nekomata is the multi-tailed version, often an ordinary house cat that has grown old enough to transform. The Catbus has twelve legs, a permanent grin, and behaves exactly like a benevolent version of both.

Can I watch Mei and the Kittenbus at home?

No. The 13-minute 2002 short is screened only at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka and at Ghibli Park in Nagakute. It has never been released on disc or streaming.

Which Ghibli film should I watch first if I only care about the cats?

Whisper of the Heart then The Cat Returns, in that order. The tabby and the figurine in the first film are the setup for everything in the second, and watching them backwards spoils a genuinely elegant piece of world-building across two directors.

The Short Version

The cats in the Ghibli catalogue are load-bearing. The Catbus is a nekomata with a route number. Jiji is a child’s inner voice with fur on it, and the Disney dub blunted that on purpose. The Baron started as a shop-window figurine in a film by Yoshifumi Kondō and ended up headlining a feature by Hiroyuki Morita, which nobody planned. And the first famous cat Miyazaki ever drew belongs to a different studio entirely. Give the credits to the right people, and the animals get more interesting, not less.

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