Japan’s iconic Studio Ghibli has been awarded the 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, widely considered Spain’s answer to the Nobel Prize (though unlike its Scandinavian counterpart, this one has so far escaped the lobbying of insecure heads of state).
Announced on Wednesday by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, the honor places the Tokyo-based studio in good company alongside past laureates including Margaret Atwood, Martin Scorsese, and Meryl Streep. Each prize comes with a Joan Miró sculpture, a diploma, and €50,000. Ghibli’s will be presented in October at a ceremony in Oviedo led by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia.
The jury praised Ghibli’s hand-drawn craft and its environmental sensibility, calling its films a “cultural bridge” that transmits values of empathy, respect, friendship, and love of nature across generations and borders. They also singled out the studio’s tradition of complex, transformative female protagonists as a virtue worth recognition.
Animation has been recognized by the Princess of Asturias award in the past, though never quite as directly as this. Iranian-French cartoonist and Persepolis director Marjane Satrapi won in 2024, and Argentine cartoonist Quino, creator of Mafalda, which is getting an animated adaptation at Netflix, was honored in 2014.
Studio Ghibli, founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki, is the first recipient from the anime industry, and the first purely animation winner. It comes just two years after the studio’s honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2024 and will certainly not be the last such prize granted to the iconic outfit.