Hard Worldbuilding vs. Soft Worldbuilding | A Study of Studio Ghibli

POSTAL ADDRESS (if you're kind enough to send me a letter or something!)

Tim Hickson
PO Box 69062
Lincoln, 7608
Canterbury, New Zealand

Script by meeeeeeeee

The artist who design my cover photo:

Stay nerdy!
Tim

[HelloFutureMe]

Is your worldbuilding hard or soft, and if it's soft, how do you use that softness in your story? Stay nerdy!
~ Tim

[jemimawickham]

Soft world building seems to recreate that half-sense of the world you have when you're a child

[coldermusic]

Another example of soft world building is Alice in wonderland, where you never actually know what’s going.

[Miatpi]

Soft worldbuilding: makes a world for the story.
Hard worldbuilding: makes a story for the world.

[replaceablehead]

Something I notice about the most successful soft world building examples, is the use of mundane detail. Mizakis films are richly detailed, characters eat in real time, they put keys in doors before opening them, they start engines in real time, they put shoes on in real time. They do ridiculous amounts of cooking and did I mention the eating? They even walk places in real time. This is the most profound thing about Mizaki if you ask me, although it's not uncommon in Japanese cinema, battle scenes in Akira Kurosawa Seven Samuri play out like live sporting events and there is plenty of eat and walking in that too. I think this is part of what provides the depth, the depth is given not exposition about the wider location, but by showing characters engaged in very ordinary task within the location.

[johnnyunderhillproductions]

Soft world building really helps capture a “child-like” wonder. The floating city of Laputa in Castle In the Sky is a really amazing example. I watched the movie for the first time at 18, and it made me remember what child wonder felt like.

[Mr.Nichan]

Some of the world-building elements in "Spirited Away" are actually just Japanese mythology and Shintoism; for examples, if you're Japanese or familiar with the mythology a bit, a hopping lantern doesn't really need any more explanation than a vampire does, and the ideas about pollution and spirits have a bit of a Shinto vibe. That being said, any kind of mythology allows many interpretations and worlds based on them, and "Spirited Away" is definitely still pretty soft.

[starparik]

Miyazaki’s stories are like a magical dreams we used to have in childhood. Not everything makes sense yet it all feels so real and immersive.

[itmedana]

i also find that having the main character of the story be someone who’s new to the world lends itself more easily to those soft worldbuilding techniques. having a character discover and explore the world alongside the reader/viewer creates a more immersive feeling as opposed to placing the audience in a pre established world and then catching them up through detailed explanations

[steam]

I feel like what makes Spirited Away so good is that it's literally like a dream. You don't understand why things are happening, you just fill the holes with your own interpretation and imagination.

Like why your dog was apparently flying but unknown creatures were also chasing him?

It's weird but so imaginative and great to think about.

[PrettyParodys]

The scene where Chihiro cries while eating a rice ball....this always makes me tear up. The first time I saw it I balled my eyes out... because I've literally done that. Holding everything thing, trying to stay calm in turmoil...then eating something so comforting..it just breaks you down and releases you from the tension.

[acecat]

One note I'd add is that Lord of the Rings (especially the books) and Spirited Away both take many elements of their stories from folklore. In Spirited Away, that includes certain characters being based on traditional yōkai, the fact that Chihiro crosses over to the spirit world at dusk and that she is allowed to eat food that she is given but her parents are punished for taking food without asking. Those things may be alien to the real world, but they're alien in ways that make sense if you're familiar with folklore about spirits. Lord of the Rings feels much more like Arthurian legends, the Kalevala, the Norse Eddas, the Mabinogion- not just because they use the tropes and traditions of northern Europe but because those stories were mytho-histories about rulers and heroes who may have been based on real people or not but either way were considered key figures in their cultures' histories. Lord of the Rings is basically the last cycle of the epic that the Silmarillion started. The Hobbit feels different from LotR because it's based on stories closer in genre to those that influenced Spirited Away- bedtime stories. Jack and the Beanstalk doesn't explain why the giant lives in the clouds, neither do most yōkai stories need to explain why the Jorōgumo was living in a waterfall. But "Beowulf" is going to tell you everything's lineage because that's part of why you care about this king, this sword, this monster, that pile of gold. They're stories serving different purposes, and you get invested by different storytelling methods- explaining everything versus leaving it to the audience's _emotional_ intuition.

[LocardIII]

Here’s a wild concept: hard-build your world but tell the story as if you soft-built it. Then as time goes on in your series you can reveal more and more of the world. Don’t make later “clarifications” like Rowling. Instead show it as your reader picks up the next book.

[peskymacaw]

For us, Spirited Away may not make much sense. However, for a japanese audience, it does have a different signifficance, because the movie incorporates a lot of Shinto symbolism. For example, Haku is the guardian spirit (kami) of a minor river, but the spirit that Chihiro helps is the spirit of a mayor river, therefore, he is revered by the other kami in the bath house. In the japanese folklore there's already a stablished hierarchy for the Kamis. And, the kami that Chihiro helps may be hinted to be the guardian of an actual major river in Tokyo (Kanda or Sumida, I don't remember), that during the 50's was used by some people as a dump, and when it was cleaned years later, all kind of stuff was find in there, from washing machines to bicycles.

[luckyjinxer]

The Hobbit, taken as itself, is soft world book in a hard world universe, and it works well.

[BoB]

Tolkien struggled much with his hard world building approach. He spent most of his life after the publication of Lord of the Rings with trying to fit it in the larger mythology. He wrote countless essays about seemingly trivial things like how lembas bread works, what kind of facial hair the different races have, how Numenorian succession worked. He even got into meta discussions with himself how elven immortality functions, if orcs were wholly evil and where they came from etc etc.

It kind of prevented him from finishing and releasing more of his work. On the other hand it achieved the in my opinion best, most coherent and deepest lore of any work of fantasy ever.

[zoodls]

one thing I love so much about soft world building is how many times you can rewatch a film and find something new every time. I have watched howls moving castle so many times and every time I find a new little detail about how the world works and it makes the movie even more beautiful every single time.

[nuclearbtch]

"You don't need to feel compelled to justify everything you create"
I really needed to hear that
I've been spending so much time worldbuilding (three years actually) that honestly i put off actually writing and drawing for the longest time HAHA
Thank u
I should just Do It

[TheMimiSard]

I think your assessment of the soft world-building of Harry Potter is one of the big reasons why it became such a huge fanfiction fandom - the world-building was so open people could think up a lot of creative stories because it had so much space to do so in.

[gecfes]

Something I love about the ghibli films is the fact that places just exist.
Outside of our main cast, life goes on. Like the other towns the magic door in Howl's moving castle leads to. There are just other places in the world. I feel as though most other stories make a big deal out of other places just existing.