An exhibition asking why Studio Ghibli and Zen belong together has opened at the Higashiyama Cube of the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art. Titled Zen and Ghibli, it runs from October 3 to December 6, 2026, and was planned and produced by Studio Ghibli and Nippon TV. The premise is that the connection should be felt through the space itself, not explained away. The exhibition's origin is producer Toshio Suzuki's 2018 book Zen and Ghibli, in which he spoke with three Zen priests — Shugen Genyu, Nanrei Yokota, and Shinsuke Hosokawa — about life and death through Ghibli films such as Princess Mononoke and Grave of the Fireflies and through his collaborations with Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. What links the two, the show proposes, is Ghibli's refusal to split the world into good and evil or to hurry toward answers: instead of dissecting everything, its films accept ambiguity, an attitude that resonates with a Zen way of seeing things as they are. The clearest emblem is Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron (2023), placed at the exhibition's center. In the film, the bereaved protagonist Mahito follows a heron into another world; the show mirrors this structure, inviting visitors from the heron into the first chapter, titled "That World, This World," evoking the corridor of time from the film. Beyond its doors, Ghibli's crossings between worlds recur through sculpture, film, and staging: Yubaba waiting in Spirited Away (2001), Ponyo racing across a giant fish in Ponyo (2008), the castle lurching into motion in Howl's Moving Castle (2004). Producer-department member Makoto Hashida says the project grew from Suzuki's idea over about five years, and describes the show as one possible answer to the question the film posed — an invitation for visitors to think about what Zen might be.