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Beautiful covers make Studio Ghibli vinyl soundtracks and image albums look as good as they sound

Casey Baseel Jun 2, 2025
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Gorgeous artwork graces the jackets of LP releases of the work of Ghibli’s greatest composer.

Some audiophiles insist that vinyl recordings sound better than digital ones. You can make a pretty strong argument, though, that they sound better too, Because of their size and scratchable material, records need jackets, and those jackets can have beautiful artwork.

Serving as stunning examples of that are these vinyl records for the anime films of Studio Ghibli, on offer from specialty shop Donguri Kyowakoku. There aren’t just rectangular croppings of their respective movie posters or DVD covers, either, but artwork specially chosen for the LP jackets.

Pictured above is the soundtrack for Princess Mononoke, which comes on two double-sided records containing 33 songs from Jo Hisaishi, the long-collaborating composer behind all of the Ghibli anime music we’ll be looking at today, including Spirited Away. The perspective and sense of scale on the 21-song soundtrack’s cover makes the bathhouse of the gods look both unsettling and intriguing, which describes the tone of many of the film’s scenes.

Ghibli’s memorable anime architecture is also on display from a fresh angle in the jacket for the 26-piece Howl’s Moving Castle soundtrack.

Though Hisaishi has composed the scores for just about all of director Hayao Miyazaki’s theatrical anime, he worked only one time with Isao Takahata when the late Ghibli co-founder was in the director’s chair, making the 37-piece soundtrack for The Tale of the Princess Kaguya a once-in-an-artistic lifetime collaboration between the two.

And last, we come to what was supposed to be Miyazaki’s last feature-length anime, The Wind Rises, and its 32-piece soundtrack.

All of the above soundtracks are two-record sets, although only the Princess Mononoke one uses both sides of both records, with the others using only one side of their second. Meanwhile, the Kiki’s Delivery Service Soundtrack Music Collection is a more modestly sized one-disc, 21-piece selection of music from the only anime produced, directed, and written by Miyazaki.

And if you want even more beautiful Ghibli record jacket art, it can be found on the covers for the film’s “image albums.”

Image albums are what the Japanese music sphere calls musical compositions inspired by the setting, story, and characters of an animated work, but which aren’t heard within the anime itself. In the case of the Kik’s Delivery Service image album above, for example, Hisaishi’s aim was to recreate the feeling of how Miyazaki described the setting to him, “A vaguely European town, somewhere near the Mediterranean sea,” in musical form, in much the same way that the beautiful cover artwork of Kiki getting ready to depart her parent’s house isn’t taken directly from the film. That same philosophy is behind the image albums for Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Princess Monoke.

Each of the image albums are single-record, with 10 pieces of music and priced at 4,180 yen (US$29), as is the Kiki’s Delivery Service Soundtrack Music Collection, while the two record soundtracks are 5,280 yen. Several of them were sold out and unavailable until recently, but they’re all restocked and can be ordered through the Donguri Kyowakoku online store here.

Source: Donguri Kyowakoku
Top image: Donguri Kyowakoku
Insert images: Donguri Kyowakoku (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
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