Studio Ghibli unveils Miyazaki art

Studio Ghibli fans just got a new window into how Hayao Miyazaki thinks on paper. The immediate news is a new volume in the Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Collection, covering Whisper of the Heart and On Your Mark, with publication set for June 4, 2026. The bigger reason people care is that this is not just another reprint book — it pulls together 178 pieces of pre-production art, including unpublished work, and some of the most interesting pages come from a film Miyazaki wrote but did not direct. ### What is an “image board” here? An image board is basically Miyazaki’s visual thinking process. These are drawings he makes to feel out a movie’s world and to communicate tone, mood, and staging to the staff before the final film locks in. The Ghibli Museum shop description is unusually clear on this point — the books aim to reproduce the original art’s color and texture through high-precision scans, not just summarize it in a smaller companion volume. ### What exactly is in the new book? The sixth volume in the series pairs two 1995 works: Whisper of the Heart and the short On Your Mark. The count is lopsided but revealing — 21 images for Whisper of the Heart and 157 for On Your Mark, for 178 total, across a 140-page B4-format book. The volume is published by Iwanami Shoten, edited under Studio Ghibli supervision, and listed for preorder through official Ghibli channels at ¥6,160 including tax. ### Why are people zeroing in on Whisper of the Heart? Because Whisper of the Heart occupies a strange and important corner of Ghibli history. Yoshifumi Kondō directed the 1995 film, while Miyazaki handled the screenplay, storyboards, and parts of the fantasy imagery rather than taking the director’s chair himself. That makes any surviving Miyazaki concept work for the movie especially interesting — you get to see where his "everything" frame swallowing the story. ### Why does that rarity matter so much? Most people track Ghibli through finished films. But process material tells you who was solving what problem. Whisper of the Heart has long been seen as Kondō’s great feature and as part of Ghibli’s unrealized succession story — the studio had hoped he would become a next-generation director before his death in 1998. Fresh Miyazaki visual material from that production helps fans and scholars see Miyazaki's conceptual influence in a more concrete way. ### What about On Your Mark? Turns out On Your Mark may be the bulk of the package. The short, originally made as a promotional film for a CHAGE and ASKA song, accounts for 157 of the 178 included works. That suggests the book is not just a Whisper of the Heart curiosity piece — it is also a major archive drop for one of Ghibli’s most discussed side projects and experimental works from the same year. ### Is this already out? Not quite. Some coverage made it sound like the material had already landed, but the official listings point to June 4, 2026 as the publication date, with preorder pages already live as of early May. That date matters if you are trying to understand the moment — the reveal is happening now, while the actual retail release is next month. In a broad culture sense, but big news for Ghibli people. New Miyazaki art is always catnip, but the more interesting angle is narrower — this book fills in the creative record around a film where Miyazaki’s influence was crucial, visible, and still partly off to the side. That is why the announcement has real weight.