The Ghibli aesthetic is so comforting because it gives a lived-in beauty to realistic scenes like a cluttered kitchen or laundry lines in the breeze, it shows our world exactly as it is but with a softness. Nothing special needs to happen yet everything is felt: other anime styles like kawaii infantilize reality or they create this feeling of escapism, but the cuteness of Ghibli has this maturity to it because it has the emotional texture of slowness, as if saying “even this mundane thing is worth noticing”