A soldier stands under a blooming tree, rendered in soft pastel colors. His uniform is spotless. His smile is kind. He looks like he belongs in a dream. But this isn’t a scene from a Studio Ghibli film—it’s an AI-generated image shared by the Israeli military during a ceasefire breach, following 18 months of relentless assault and a clear genocidal campaign in Gaza.
The image borrows the unmistakable visual language of Japanese animator and illustrator Hayao Miyazaki: soft palettes, sun-dappled forests, and wide-eyed serenity. But behind this aesthetic calm lies a violent truth. While homes are bombed and children buried under rubble, propaganda paints their killers as gentle protectors.
Recently, OpenAI’s tools, including ChatGPT, have enabled users to generate “Ghibli-style” portraits of themselves. It’s an act of harmless fantasy at first glance, a way to slip into a dreamy, animated world. But what began as playful self-mythologizing quickly turned darker, as militaries, influencers, and institutions seized this visual softness to rebrand violence with charm.
There’s actually a term for this: artwashing—the use of cultural references and beauty to obscure violence. In addition to being completely ironic, the appropriation of Studio Ghibli’s deeply anti-war aesthetic is obscene.
Miyazaki’s work quietly resists power. His films don’t offer triumphs or redemption arcs for warriors. In Princess Mononoke, the land is wounded by industrial expansion. In The Wind Rises, an inventor watches his dream of flight turned into death from above. In Grave of the Fireflies, children starve in the aftermath of firebombing. War, in these films, is not a backdrop for bravery but a catastrophe that leaves everyone diminished.
The artist has always rejected militarism, in his work and in his personal life. He boycotted the 2003 Oscars in protest of the Iraq War. He has dismissed AI-generated art as soulless, an affront to human creation. His characters are not perfect heroes but complicated, hurting people trying to find their way through grief, destruction, and moral ambiguity.
To use his visual style to sanitize images of a military currently engaged in ethnic cleansing is more than tone-deaf—it’s a betrayal of everything his films stand for. It is the artistic equivalent of quoting a peace poem to justify a massacre.
In The Boy and the Heron, his final film and perhaps his most intimate, war is not a metaphor. It is the inciting trauma. The story opens in flames– a hospital fire, a mother’s death, a child displaced by bombing. What follows is a surreal descent into mourning, where even magical creatures cannot erase the pain.
This film doesn’t offer heroes or saviors. It lingers in grief and ambiguity. It asks: What kind of world rises from ash? What stories will we dare to tell? And how does a child rebuild their imagination after living through violence?
To juxtapose this film’s visual legacy with stylized images of soldiers—circulated by a military responsible for killing thousands of civilians, most of them women and children—is not just cynical. It’s theft. It’s the repurposing of an anti-war language to excuse war crimes.
Propaganda prefers soft edges. Horror, when rendered in watercolor, is easier to look at. A soldier drawn like a Miyazaki character may be remembered not as a participant in war but as a whimsical protagonist. This is pure distortion and erasure. As the smiling soldier replaces the faces of the dead, spectacle overwrites memory.
The actual representation. https://t.co/JkSOX6fyDa pic.twitter.com/YltYn9W0B6
— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws) March 31, 2025
Israel has long invested in soft power. Since the rise of the BDS movement, it has launched major efforts to reframe its image through art, music, and culture. Leaked documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs outlined plans to promote the “beautiful face” of the state while burying the reality of occupation. The Ghibli-styled images are simply the latest evolution of that strategy. But this time, the stolen language is explicitly anti-war, and its theft adds another layer to the violence.
Miyazaki’s world is one where forests are sacred, war is mourned, and children are allowed to feel everything. His art wasn’t meant to serve states, but to haunt them.
In a time of genocide, aesthetic choices are political acts. Rendering a soldier as a whimsical anime figure isn’t innocent. It is an attempt to replace atrocity with charm, to soften injustice until it feels like fantasy.
But we remember. We must.
And the responsibility doesn’t fall on artists alone. It falls on viewers, critics, educators, and platforms to name the distortion, reject the myth, and insist that not all beauty is benign. When war wears watercolors, someone has to name the blood beneath the paint.
