Stu­dio Ghibli’s films are being made avail­able for dig­i­tal purchase

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li made waves this past Octo­ber when the leg­endary ani­ma­tion stu­dio announced that for the first time in their his­to­ry, they would be mak­ing their full cat­a­log avail­able for online stream­ing. In coop­er­a­tion with ani­ma­tion importer GKIDS, HBO’s new ser­vice will have the com­plete Ghi­b­li canon in the spring, but that was just the begin­ning of their plans to get some new mon­ey flow­ing in from West­ern markets.

Now Vari­ety has the news that Ghi­b­li will also license their films for a com­plete dig­i­tal pur­chase, to own rather than rent. For a film­mak­ing house hereto­fore jeal­ous­ly guard­ed about how their out­put goes into the world, it’s a major shift in policy.

The Vari­ety item spec­i­fies that both the orig­i­nal Japan­ese and the dubbed Eng­lish ver­sions will be put up for down­load on ​“all major dig­i­tal trans­ac­tion­al plat­forms,” a mouth­ful of a phrase sug­gest­ing that Ama­zon, YouTube, Google Play, and the like will all have access. That’s the good news; the regret­table news is that the down­loads will only be offered to users in North Amer­i­ca, leav­ing the UK out in the cold for the time being.

It’ll take a minute for every­thing to get set­tled, with The Wind Ris­es join­ing the col­lec­tion at a lat­er date in the third quar­ter of the year, for what­ev­er rea­son. Vari­ety cites the ​“sug­gest­ed price” of each film at $19.99, which may also give some diehard fans pause, as DVDs of some Ghi­b­li entries can still be had for a bit less than that much.

In the big-pic­ture sense, it would appear that Ghibli’s try­ing to shore up their future prospects in the stream­ing world as the Dis­ney Plus leviathan con­tin­ues to increase in size and pow­er. Those with a clos­er knowl­edge of the studio’s inter­nal deci­sion-mak­ing process, how­ev­er, will be able to rec­og­nize their choice as a direct con­se­quence of the Ghi­b­lio­theque pod­cast team’s recent pil­grim­age to Japan. Their influ­ence tru­ly knows no bounds.