[owenversteeg]

I just took a look. It's 48kB uncompressed JSON. You can easily load this into a browser tab. Why is it an API?

To save anybody from copy-and-pasting it, here's ten seconds of playing around:

> ghibli

Object {films: Array(20), people: Array(16), locations: Array(25), species: Array(5), vehicles: Array(3)}

> ghibli.films[0]

Object {id: "2baf70d1-42bb-4437-b551-e5fed5a87abe", title: "Castle in the Sky", description: "The orphan Sheeta inherited a mysterious crystal t…uta's science to make himself ruler of the world.", director: "Hayao Miyazaki", producer: "Isao Takahata"…}

> ghibli.locations[0]

Object {id: "11014596-71b0-4b3e-b8c0-1c4b15f28b9a", name: "Irontown", climate: "Continental", terrain: "Mountain", surface_water: "40"…}

> ghibli.people[0]

Object {id: "ba924631-068e-4436-b6de-f3283fa848f0", name: "Ashitaka", gender: "male", age: "late teens", eye_color: "brown"…}

[flashman]

> Why is it an API?

It's not an official Studio Ghibli API. But it's exactly what you'd build if you were learning to build APIs.

[toyg]

Likely because someone wanted to play around, which is how even popular APIs like the Pokemon and StarWars ones started.

Besides, being an API it can be extended with things like quotes, exact appearance times etc etc.