Back in March, while watching Howl's Moving Castle, Trege and I ended up coming up with a conspiracy theory. Even though we were really tired when we came up with it, I'm still kinda proud of it and it still kinda blows my mind. ovO I've decided to finally share it!
Early in the movie, some characters mention a rumor that wizards steal people's hearts. Trege wondered if Ni No Kuni referenced that. In Ni No Kuni, the evil wizard Shadar breaks people's hearts and steals the pieces.
The lore in Ni No Kuni says that there are multiple different worlds, and each person has "soulmates" in the other worlds - people who're very much like them and connected to them via their soul.
I started to wonder... What if every Studio Ghibli work takes place in the same universe, just in different worlds? What if some of the characters from different Ghibli works are soulmates of each other?!
I noted that Howl from Howl's Moving Castle seems rather similar to Haku from Spirited Away.
Furthermore, there's the fact that whenever something happens to someone in one world, something similar happens to their soulmate in another world, so...
Spoiler: Additional notes involving spoilers about Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away • show What if Howl losing his heart and Haku ending up forgetting himself under the witch's control happened at the same time? What if Howl regaining his heart and Haku remembering who he really is happened at the same time?
People also pointed out that the cat in Oliver's world, in Ni No Kuni, seems pretty reminiscent of the catbus from My Neighbor Totoro.
Bonus:
We ended up agreeing that if there was a video game about this, it'd probably be kinda similar to Kingdom Hearts. Then, I realized... Disney owns Studio Ghibli movies. What if we got to go to Ghibli worlds in Kingdom Hearts?! O:
That is pretty deep, we'll probably never know, but it would be a win for Ghibli Studio if they were able to pull that off.