hayao miyazaki biography

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies

Cinema and Media Studies

• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Hayao Miyazaki

Introduction, career overviews.

• Thematic Analysis
• Studies of Specific Works
• On the Creative Process
• Within the Context of the Anime and Global Animation Industry

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Animation and the Animated Film
• Film Aesthetics
• Japanese Cinema
• Stop-Motion Animation

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Superhero Films
• Wim Wenders
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Hayao Miyazaki by Raz Greenberg LAST REVIEWED: 28 October 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0337

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1942) is arguably the most admired figure of Japan’s postwar animation industry (commonly known as anime). Deeply moved in his youth by his country’s first color feature-length animated film Hakujaden ( Panda and the Magic Serpent , 1958, directed by Taiji Yabushita), Miyazaki decided to seek a career in animation after receiving his BA degree in politics and economy. Most of his output during the first sixteen years of his work as an animator consisted of working on other directors’ films and television shows. Miyazaki made his directorial debut, sharing credit and duties with his colleague Isao Takahata, on the television series Rupan Sansei ( Lupin the Third , 1971–1972), an adaptation of a popular manga (comics) series about the exploits of a daring thief. The year 1979 saw the release of Miyazaki’s feature-length debut Rupan Sansei: Kariosuturo no Shiro ( Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro ), a spin-off of the television series, which gained attention for its spectacular action sequences. His second feature, Kaze no Tani no Naushika ( Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , 1984), a theatrical feature adaptation of his own long-running manga series about the quest of a pacifist princess to save a war-torn world destroyed in an environmental apocalypse, hailed for its beautiful animation, design, and environmental subtext. The success of Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind led to the foundation of Studio Ghibli, under the creative management of Miyazaki and Takahata. A string of critically acclaimed works solidified his position as a leading director in Japan’s animation industry: the Victorian-flavored adventure Tenkū no Shiro Rapyuta ( Castle in the Sky , 1986), the nostalgic children’s fantasy Tonari no Totoro ( My Neighbor Totoro , 1988), the coming-of-age fantasy Majo no Takkyūbin ( Kiki’s Delivery Service , 1989) and the historical comedy-adventure Kurenai no Buta ( Porco Rosso , 1992). At the turn of the century, Miyazaki directed the acclaimed historical fantasy Mononoke Hime ( Princess Mononoke , 1997) and the modern-day fantasy Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi ( Spirited Away , 2001), and each became the highest-grossing film in the history of Japanese cinema, an evidence of the important position that Miyazaki has achieved in Japan’s postwar culture. Spirited Away also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2002. Miyazaki’s later films in the 21st century met with a more mixed reception. Hauru no Ugoku Shiro ( Howl’s Moving Castle , 2004), Gake no Ue no Ponyo ( Ponyo , 2008), and Kaze Tachinu ( The Wind Rises , 2013) were praised for their visuals, but came under criticism for their narrative qualities. The ongoing debate as to who is going to be Miyazaki’s successor as Japan’s leading animator demonstrates the deep cultural influence that his work continues to have on other animators and filmmakers.

Several books in English have explored Miyazaki’s biography and career, focusing mostly on his feature-length theatrical works. Although most of the historical information available in such books is also available from online sources, commentary and analysis provided in some of these books keeps them relevant, and makes them a very good starting point for the Miyazaki scholarship. McCarthy 1999 highlights the artistic and narrative qualities of each film by Miyazaki while Napier 2018 is more focused on the connection between Miyazaki’s personal biography and his ideology to his films. GhibliWiki is an online encyclopedic source, which remains the most comprehensive database in English for information about Miyazaki.

This online database, established in 1994 under the name "The Hayao Miyazaki Web" and switched to Wiki format in 2008, is the oldest and one of the most extensive online sources dedicated to Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli in English, containing information related to the studio personnel, films, and media materials. Although the website has lost its exclusiveness in the past ten years with the publication of both new books and new online sources, it remains a solid overview of Studio Ghibli’s work and its historical roots.

McCarthy, Helen. Hayao Miyazaki, Master of Japanese Animation: Films, Themes, Artistry . Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1999.

The very first book written in English on Miyazaki’s work, at a time when most of this work was not available in translation in English-speaking territories, covering his feature-length work up to Princess Mononoke . Each film is discussed in the context of its design, plot, and themes, and McCarthy’s detailed analysis of each film, though criticized for its passionate tone made by an admitted fan of the director, remains thought provoking, emphasizing the humane subtext of Miyazaki’s filmography.

Napier, Susan. Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.

Napier’s book analyzes Miyazaki’s feature-length filmography (examining all his films, up to and including The Wind Rises ) offering a deep discussion of each film and how it reflects the director’s personal biography and his ideological views. Napier’s definition of the “Miyazakiworld”—the creation of an immersive animated world for each of Miyazaki’s films—as a staple for his work lays a solid basis for future study and discussions.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Cinema and Media Studies »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• À bout de souffle
• Accounting, Motion Picture
• Action Cinema
• Advertising and Promotion
• African American Cinema
• African American Stars
• African Cinema
• AIDS in Film and Television
• Akerman, Chantal
• Allen, Woody
• Almodóvar, Pedro
• Altman, Robert
• American Cinema, 1895-1915
• American Cinema, 1939-1975
• American Cinema, 1976 to Present
• American Independent Cinema
• American Independent Cinema, Producers
• American Public Broadcasting
• Anderson, Wes
• Animals in Film and Media
• Arbuckle, Roscoe
• Architecture and Cinema
• Argentine Cinema
• Aronofsky, Darren
• Arzner, Dorothy
• Asian American Cinema
• Asian Television
• Astaire, Fred and Rogers, Ginger
• Audiences and Moviegoing Cultures
• Australian Cinema
• Authorship, Television
• Avant-Garde and Experimental Film
• Bachchan, Amitabh
• Battle of Algiers, The
• Battleship Potemkin, The
• Bazin, André
• Bergman, Ingmar
• Bernstein, Elmer
• Bertolucci, Bernardo
• Bigelow, Kathryn
• Birth of a Nation, The
• Blade Runner
• Blockbusters
• Bong, Joon Ho
• Brakhage, Stan
• Brando, Marlon
• Brazilian Cinema
• Breaking Bad
• Bresson, Robert
• British Cinema
• Broadcasting, Australian
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Burnett, Charles
• Buñuel, Luis
• Cameron, James
• Campion, Jane
• Canadian Cinema
• Capra, Frank
• Carpenter, John
• Cassavetes, John
• Cavell, Stanley
• Chahine, Youssef
• Chan, Jackie
• Chaplin, Charles
• Children in Film
• Chinese Cinema
• Cinecittà Studios
• Cinema and Media Industries, Creative Labor in
• Cinema and the Visual Arts
• Cinematography and Cinematographers
• Citizen Kane
• City in Film, The
• Cocteau, Jean
• Coen Brothers, The
• Colonial Educational Film
• Comedy, Film
• Comedy, Television
• Comics, Film, and Media
• Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI)
• Copland, Aaron
• Coppola, Francis Ford
• Copyright and Piracy
• Corman, Roger
• Costume and Fashion
• Cronenberg, David
• Cuban Cinema
• Cult Cinema
• Dance and Film
• de Oliveira, Manoel
• Dean, James
• Deleuze, Gilles
• Denis, Claire
• Deren, Maya
• Design, Art, Set, and Production
• Detective Films
• Dietrich, Marlene
• Digital Media and Convergence Culture
• Disney, Walt
• Documentary Film
• Downton Abbey
• Dr. Strangelove
• Dreyer, Carl Theodor
• Eastern European Television
• Eastwood, Clint
• Eisenstein, Sergei
• Elfman, Danny
• Ethnographic Film
• European Television
• Exhibition and Distribution
• Exploitation Film
• Fairbanks, Douglas
• Fan Studies
• Fellini, Federico
• Film and Literature
• Film Guilds and Unions
• Film, Historical
• Film Preservation and Restoration
• Film Theory and Criticism, Science Fiction
• Film Theory Before 1945
• Film Theory, Psychoanalytic
• Finance Film, The
• French Cinema
• Game of Thrones
• Gance, Abel
• Gangster Films
• Garbo, Greta
• Garland, Judy
• German Cinema
• Gilliam, Terry
• Global Television Industry
• Godard, Jean-Luc
• Godfather Trilogy, The
• Golden Girls, The
• Greek Cinema
• Griffith, D.W.
• Hammett, Dashiell
• Haneke, Michael
• Hawks, Howard
• Haynes, Todd
• Hepburn, Katharine
• Herrmann, Bernard
• Herzog, Werner
• Hindi Cinema, Popular
• Hitchcock, Alfred
• Hollywood Studios
• Holocaust Cinema
• Hong Kong Cinema
• Horror-Comedy
• Hsiao-Hsien, Hou
• Hungarian Cinema
• Icelandic Cinema
• Immigration and Cinema
• Indigenous Media
• Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and ...
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Iranian Cinema
• Irish Cinema
• Israeli Cinema
• It Happened One Night
• Italian Americans in Cinema and Media
• Italian Cinema
• Jazz Singer, The
• Jews in American Cinema and Media
• Keaton, Buster
• Kitano, Takeshi
• Korean Cinema
• Kracauer, Siegfried
• Kubrick, Stanley
• Lang, Fritz
• Latin American Cinema
• Latina/o Americans in Film and Television
• Lee, Chang-dong
• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Cin...
• Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The
• Los Angeles and Cinema
• Lubitsch, Ernst
• Lumet, Sidney
• Lupino, Ida
• Lynch, David
• Marker, Chris
• Martel, Lucrecia
• Masculinity in Film
• Media, Community
• Media Ecology
• Memory and the Flashback in Cinema
• Metz, Christian
• Mexican Cinema
• Micheaux, Oscar
• Ming-liang, Tsai
• Minnelli, Vincente
• Miyazaki, Hayao
• Méliès, Georges
• Modernism and Film
• Monroe, Marilyn
• Mészáros, Márta
• Music and Cinema, Classical Hollywood
• Music and Cinema, Global Practices
• Music, Television
• Music Video
• Musicals on Television
• Native Americans
• New Media Art
• New Media Policy
• New Media Theory
• New York City and Cinema
• New Zealand Cinema
• Opera and Film
• Ophuls, Max
• Orphan Films
• Oshima, Nagisa
• Ozu, Yasujiro
• Panh, Rithy
• Pasolini, Pier Paolo
• Passion of Joan of Arc, The
• Peckinpah, Sam
• Philosophy and Film
• Photography and Cinema
• Pickford, Mary
• Planet of the Apes
• Poems, Novels, and Plays About Film
• Poitier, Sidney
• Polanski, Roman
• Polish Cinema
• Politics, Hollywood and
• Pop, Blues, and Jazz in Film
• Pornography
• Postcolonial Theory in Film
• Potter, Sally
• Prime Time Drama
• Queer Television
• Queer Theory
• Race and Cinema
• Radio and Sound Studies
• Ray, Nicholas
• Ray, Satyajit
• Reality Television
• Reenactment in Cinema and Media
• Regulation, Television
• Religion and Film
• Remakes, Sequels and Prequels
• Renoir, Jean
• Resnais, Alain
• Romanian Cinema
• Romantic Comedy, American
• Rossellini, Roberto
• Russian Cinema
• Saturday Night Live
• Scandinavian Cinema
• Scorsese, Martin
• Scott, Ridley
• Searchers, The
• Sennett, Mack
• Sesame Street
• Shakespeare on Film
• Silent Film
• Simpsons, The
• Singin' in the Rain
• Sirk, Douglas
• Soap Operas
• Social Class
• Social Media
• Social Problem Films
• Soderbergh, Steven
• Sound Design, Film
• Sound, Film
• Spanish Cinema
• Spanish-Language Television
• Spielberg, Steven
• Sports and Media
• Sports in Film
• Stand-Up Comedians
• Streaming Television
• Sturges, Preston
• Surrealism and Film
• Taiwanese Cinema
• Tarantino, Quentin
• Tarkovsky, Andrei
• Tati, Jacques
• Television Audiences
• Television Celebrity
• Television, History of
• Television Industry, American
• Theater and Film
• Theory, Cognitive Film
• Theory, Critical Media
• Theory, Feminist Film
• Theory, Film
• Theory, Trauma
• Touch of Evil
• Transnational and Diasporic Cinema
• Trinh, T. Minh-ha
• Truffaut, François
• Turkish Cinema
• Twilight Zone, The
• Varda, Agnès
• Vertov, Dziga
• Video and Computer Games
• Video Installation
• Violence and Cinema
• Virtual Reality
• Visconti, Luchino
• Von Sternberg, Josef
• Von Stroheim, Erich
• von Trier, Lars
• Warhol, The Films of Andy
• Waters, John
• Wayne, John
• Weerasethakul, Apichatpong
• Weir, Peter
• Welles, Orson
• Wenders, Wim
• Whedon, Joss
• Wilder, Billy
• Williams, John
• Wiseman, Frederick
• Wizard of Oz, The
• Women and Film
• Women and the Silent Screen
• Wong, Anna May
• Wong, Kar-wai
• Wood, Natalie
• Yang, Edward
• Yimou, Zhang
• Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema
• Zinnemann, Fred
• Zombies in Cinema and Media
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|81.177.182.136]
• 81.177.182.136

• Business Biographies
• Hayao Miyazaki 1941— Biography

Hayao Miyazaki 1941–

Chief executive officer, Studio Ghibli

Nationality: Japanese.

Born: January 5, 1941, in Tokyo, Japan.

Education: Gakushuin University, BA, 1963.

Family: Son of Katsuji Miyazaki (aircraft-parts manufacturer); married Akemi Ota (animator); children: two.

Career: Toei Animation, 1963–1971, animator; A Pro, 1971–1973, animator and director; Zuiyo Pictures, 1973–1978, animator and director; Tokyo Movie Shinsha, 1979–1982, director; Tokuma, 1982–1998, director; Studio Ghibli, 1985–1998, director and producer; 1999–, CEO.

Address: Studio Ghibli, 1-4-25, Kajino-cho, Koganei-shi, 184, Japan; http://www.ntv.co.jp/ghibli.

■ The director, producer, animator, and storyteller Hayao Miyazaki was the leader of one of the most successful animated motion picture studios in the world, Studio Ghibli. The studio arose out of his success with the motion picture Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , and its continued success was wholly dependent on the motion pictures that he wrote and directed. In the 1990s he created the most successful films in the history of Japan, setting numerous box-office records. While his films were already popular among anime enthusiasts worldwide, a distribution deal with Disney Studios in 1996 brought several of Miyazaki's works to broader audiences; he had established himself as an innovator and artist at least equal in stature to Walt Disney himself. As a leader Miyazaki attracted to his productions some of Japan's finest writers, artists, directors, and producers, as well as the outstanding composer Joe Hisaishi, whose scores for Miyazaki's films became classics themselves.

Miyazaki was born on January 5, 1941, in Tokyo. He was one of four sons of Katsuji Miyazaki, who worked in the family business Miyazaki Airplanes, which manufactured parts for warplanes. Miyazaki indicated later in life that he felt guilty that his family had profited from Japan's efforts in World War II. His dislike of militarism would be reflected in such films as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Porco Rosso . Partly to escape the American bombing of Tokyo and partly to be closer to the Miyazaki Airplanes factory in Kanuma City, Katsuji Miyazaki moved his family to Utsunomiya City, where they lived from 1944 to 1946. During this period the young Hayao may have become familiar with the forest that would figure prominently in My Neighbor Totoro . His mother was sick with spinal tuberculosis from 1947 to 1955, staying in a hospital for three of those years; this state of affairs prefigured the family situation presented in My Neighbor Totoro .

In 1958 Miyazaki became interested in animated movies, his imagination having been stirred by Hakujaden (Legend of the White Snake), a motion picture that was produced by Toei Animation and was Japan's first color feature-length anime. At that time, however, Miyazaki wanted to be not an animator but a comic-book artist. He majored in economics and political science at Gakushuin University, graduating in 1963, but his heart was in the arts, especially as they appealed to children; he pursued his interest in comic books as a member of the university's children's literature club.

In April 1963 Miyazaki became an animator for Toei Animation, which produced both theatrical motion pictures and television series. He was taught the basics of animation and began at the bottom of the artistic hierarchy, laboriously filling in the cel-by-cel movements of characters and objects; he found the work enjoyable and therein probably learned to accurately draw characters. He impressed many of his coworkers with his fertile imagination and proposed numerous story ideas to the studio; he quickly became a leader in the animators' union. In 1964 he met the animator Akemi Ota, who would become his wife in 1968. That year the first motion picture in which he played a major role was released: Prince of the Sun , a collaboration with the chief animator Yasuo Otsuka and the director Isao Takahata. Takahata would later serve as the producer for some of Miyazaki's own movies.

GROWING INDEPENDENCE

In 1971 Miyazaki joined Takahata at A Pro, where he became involved in a failed effort to make an animated feature of Pippi Longstockings . In June 1973 he moved to Zuiyo Pictures, where he designed the scenes for Heidi: Girl of the Alps . By then he had established himself as an outstanding background-scene artist for both motion pictures and television animation. During the 1970s in addition to motion pictures he worked on manga , or graphic novels. The year 1979 saw the release of the first important picture directed by Miyazaki, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro . In the early 1980s he began one of his most popular manga series, based on the character Nausicaä, a princess living in a future where humanity is in peril of extinction.

In 1982 the Tokuma production company asked Miyazaki, who was by then an instructor for beginning animators and a very experienced director of television cartoons, to make the Nausicaä stories into an animated feature. Miyazaki brought in Takahata to produce the film, while he wrote the screenplay, created the story board, and painted the scenes and the characters that would be used by his animation team. Work began in 1983; Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released in 1984. The film was not a smash hit, but it proved profitable at the box office, and out of its success Tokuma created Studio Ghibli—which Miyazaki pronounced "jee-blee," after the Italian word for a dry Saharan wind as well as the name for a World War I aircraft. Nausicaä later proved to be a landmark achievement, as it had set a precedent for much of the Japanese anime that would follow, introducing realistically drawn characters and grim themes.

STUDIO GHIBLI

While Studio Ghibli produced motion pictures by people other than Miyazaki, for the most part the studio's reputation rested on what he accomplished. He directed Laputa: Castle in the Sky , which was released in 1986. (When later released by Disney, the word Laputa was dropped because of offensive connotations for Spanish speakers.) The film exhibited Miyazaki's love of all things flying—featuring an airborne castle—and included two of his recurring preoccupations: an interest in caring for nature and a mistrust of military organizations. The year 1988 saw the release of one of the greatest children's motion pictures ever made, My Neighbor Totoro , which ironically almost brought about the death of Studio Ghibli. The picture was released as a cofeature with Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies , a story of misery, hopelessness, and prolonged, agonizing deaths. The pairing was a terrible mismatch, and Japanese audiences stayed away from both films. Miyazaki saved My Neighbor Totoro with a canny marketing campaign for stuffed toys based on figures in the movie; the figures caught on and were popular well into the 2000s. With its depiction of the real forest near where Miyazaki had lived while a boy, the film inspired an environmentalist movement in Japan. Characters from the movie became part of Studio Ghibli's logo as well as symbols of the studio's motion pictures.

Next came 1989's Witch's Delivery Service (renamed Kiki's Delivery Service in America), which gained an international following. Miyazaki remarked that he set the picture in a world where World War II never happened; the seaside city where Kiki settles down appears to be French, but it is populated by a variety of ethnic groups. The motion picture was a box-office hit, setting records in Japan. In 1992 Porco Rosso (sometimes called The Crimson Pig ) was released, wherein Miyazaki indulged his passion for aircraft by depicting strange and wonderful airplanes based on actual planes from the 1920s. In his drawings Miyazaki sometimes depicted himself as a large pig; Porco Rosso featured a World War I ace who was turned into a pig. Whispers of the Heart of 1995 was a charmer that appealed more to teenage girls than to boys; the film introduced the Baron, a cat that would reappear in 2002.

Miyazaki then wrote the screenplay, drew the complete story board (as he usually did), and directed Princess Mononoke . He was criticized in the Japanese press for under-taking something that presumably no animated motion picture could accomplish: the telling of a grand epic on a massive scale. When released in Japan in 1997, Princess Mononoke was a smash hit, surpassing the success of E.T. and setting a record in grossing over $150 million. The film was a major achievement by an artist and leader at the height of his powers—but in the making of the film Miyazaki may have already been losing his eyesight; he used computer animation extensively in the movie's production, even though he very much preferred each cel to be hand-drawn. Princess Mononoke was the first of Miyazaki's movies to attract a large American audience. In 2001 Miyazaki topped that film with Spirited Away , perhaps the greatest animated motion picture ever made and widely deemed one of the best motion pictures of any kind. Therein Miyazaki united brilliant painted backgrounds with cogent characterization, all while making a fantasy world seem more real than the real world. The movie featured Miyazaki's love for children as well as his environmentalist concerns but above all his wonderful storytelling. Spirited Away broke all Japanese box-office records and was a popular success around the globe.

THE DISNEY DEAL

In the mid-1990s, Studio Ghibli's parent company, Tokuma, hit hard times. Fortunately the big box-office success in Japan of Kiki's Delivery Service had attracted the attention of Disney; Disney offered a deal that would relieve Tokuma of its financial burdens in exchange for the distribution rights worldwide—save in Southeast Asia—for motion pictures produced by Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki's approval was required to complete the deal; he gave it, explaining that he already had more money than he could possibly spend in one lifetime and that Tokuma had helped him out when he had needed it. The deal was formalized in 1996 and underwent revisions thereafter, such as the later addition of DVD distribution rights for Disney.

The motion pictures distributed by Disney would be released under the Buena Vista and Miramax labels. Although Disney had declared that it wanted to bring Miyazaki's genius to the world without tampering with the movies, it did not keep its promise. The ending of Spirited Away was slightly altered, and Kiki's Delivery Service dropped a background appearance of Miyazaki himself while adding dialogue not in the Japanese original. Meanwhile for some reason the Disney Store refused to sell Studio Ghibli movies in its shops.

On January 14, 1998, Miyazaki had announced that he would be leaving Studio Ghibli. His eyesight was failing, and he believed that he could not guarantee as high a quality of art in his motion pictures as he wished. He intended to make small films for the Studio Ghibli Museum—insisting that the museum should be full of children being noisy—and to train young animators. Yet on January 16, 1999, he returned as the shocho , or leader, of Studio Ghibli, taking a strong role in asserting organizational discipline and focusing employees on their tasks. Using computer animation to help maintain artistic control of his creations, he directed the fine The Cat Returns (2002), which featured the Baron from Whispers of the Heart , and Lord Howl's Castle (2004), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones.

sources for further information

Feldman, Steven, "Hayao Miyazaki Biography, Revision 2," Nausicaa.net, June 6, 1994, http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/miyazaki/miyazaki_biography.txt .

Momoe, Mizukubo, "It's Child's Play for Studio Ghibli," Look Japan , June 2002, pp. 34–36.

—Kirk H. Beetz

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic:.

Hayao Miyazaki

Animation department, art department.

IMDbPro Starmeter Top 5,000 112

• Contact info
• 89 wins & 62 nominations total

A Guide to the Films of Hayao Miyazaki

• character designer

• animation director

• layout artist

• key animator

• mechanical designer

• scene planner
• 15 episodes

• 26 episodes

• 20 episodes

• 52 episodes

• original story

• based on the animated feature film by

• developed by (creator)

• original work

• screenplay ...

• screenplay by

• storyboard artist

• storyboard artist (uncredited)

• storyboard artist (as Tsutomu Teruki)
• scenic designer
• scene designer

Personal details

• Miyazaki Hayao
• 5′ 4½″ (1.64 m)
• January 5 , 1941
• Tokyo, Japan
• Akemi Ôta October 1965 - present (2 children)
• Children Keisuke Miyazaki
• Katsuji Miyazaki
• Other works Logo Designer for the Japan Animator Expo.
• 5 Print Biographies
• 3 Interviews
• 1 Magazine Cover Photo

Did you know

• Trivia Japanese animator, director & manga artist.
• Quotes I'm not going to make movies that tell children, "You should despair and run away".
• the Japanese Walt Disney
• How old is Hayao Miyazaki?
• When was Hayao Miyazaki born?
• Where was Hayao Miyazaki born?

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.

Registration

Biography of Hayao Miyazaki

Early years, beginning of career, later works, further career, awards and recognition.

Hayao Miyazaki is a contemporary Japanese director and artist-animator. He was born into a family that owned an aviation factory, and from an early age, he was interested in drawing manga and animation. In 1964, he met Isao Takahata, with whom he later co-founded the animation studio Studio Ghibli. For a long time, they worked together on numerous artistic projects.

Hayao Miyazaki was born in the Akebono-tē district of Bunkyō, one of the 23 special wards of Tokyo. He was the second of four brothers. His father, Katsuzi Miyazaki, was the director of Miyazaki Airplane, a factory that manufactured parts for A6M Zero aircraft. Thanks to his father's business, the Miyazaki family lived in prosperity. Hayao developed a love for flying devices from an early age, which would later significantly influence his creativity.

In April 1963, Hayao Miyazaki started working as an in-betweener at Toei Animation, and the first film he worked on in this position was Wan Wan Chuushingura. He also participated in the production of the first series by Toei titled Okami Shonen Ken. After working on the film Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon, the studio management noticed Miyazaki's talent in animation and started assigning him more responsible tasks. Miyazaki was eventually promoted to animator. During his time at Toei, Miyazaki met Isao Takahata, and they became friends. Together, they created a union of young animators, with Miyazaki serving as its chairman. The union aimed to improve the salary and social benefits for animators, which caused many problems for Miyazaki and Takahata.

In 1971, Miyazaki left Toei and, together with Takahata and Yoichi Kotabe, they founded their own studio called A Pro. At this studio, Miyazaki and Takahata worked on the 23-episode anime Lupin the Third Part I. They also planned to create an animated film based on Astrid Lindgren's book "Pippi Longstocking," but the idea had to be abandoned due to the inability to obtain filming rights. From 1972 to 1973, Miyazaki created animation for two films in the "Panda and the Magic Serpent" series, directed by Takahata. After joining Zuiyo Eizo in June 1973, Miyazaki and Takahata participated in the World Masterpiece Theater series, working on anime such as Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Rascal the Raccoon.

In 1984, Miyazaki directed the film "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind," which became one of his most significant works and solidified his reputation as an animator. This success led him to establish his own studio, Nibariki, in 1985. Miyazaki continued to create numerous acclaimed anime films, including "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke," "Spirited Away," and "Howl's Moving Castle." He received numerous awards and nominations for his work, including an honorary Oscar in 2014 for his significant influence on the world of animation.

In October 1965, Miyazaki married his colleague Akemi Ota. They have two sons, Goro and Keisuke. Goro Miyazaki has also ventured into the animation industry as a director, working on films such as "Tales from Earthsea" and "From Up on Poppy Hill." Keisuke, on the other hand, is a woodcarver.

Throughout his career, Hayao Miyazaki has received numerous awards and recognition for his contributions to animation. He has been honored with the Noburo Ofuji Award and the Mainichi Film Award multiple times. His film "Spirited Away" won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003. In 2012, he was awarded the Person of Cultural Merit title by the Japanese government for his significant cultural contributions.

© BIOGRAPHS

Ghibli Wiki

Warning: the wiki content may contain spoilers!

• Japanese production credits
• Ponyo credits
• Português do Brasil

Hayao Miyazaki

Born in Bunkyō ward of Tokyo, Japan. He studied Political Science and Economics at Gakushuin University and later joined Toei Animation in 1963 as an animator. Following that, he became a freelancer, eventually producing Future Boy Conan and directed his first theatrical animated film The Castle of Cagliostro . In 1984, he, along with Isao Takahata , Toshio Suzuki and Yasuyoshi Tokuma co-founded Studio Ghibli . When Ghibli established its independence from Tokuma Shoten in 2005, he was appointed as Board of Directors.

Since then, he has directed numerous animated films such as My Neighbor Totoro , Kiki's Delivery Service , Howl's Moving Castle , The Wind Rises and Princess Mononoke and won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film for Spirited Away . In 2014, he became the second Japanese to win the Academy Honorary Award.

He announced his retirement after his last feature film, The Wind Rises .

In 2016, he came out of retirement to work on a new film confirmed to be The Boy and the Heron .

He lives in Tokorozawa, Saitama and is a known smoker. He is married to Akemi Miyazaki and two children, Goro Miyazaki and Keisuke Miyazaki . His blood type is O.

• 1 Character
• 2.1 Early life
• 2.2 Working as an Animator
• 2.3 Future Boy Conan
• 2.4 Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
• 2.5 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• 2.6 Studio Ghibli
• 3.1 Good & Evil
• 3.2 Environment
• 3.3 Anti-War
• 3.5 Visual Devices
• 3.6 Politics
• 4 Influences
• 6.1 Manga, Image Boards
• 6.2 Design Work
• 6.4 Books, Interviews
• 6.5 Cover Illustration
• 7 References
• 8 External links

Character [ ]

Hayao Miyazaki is emotional and passionate, has a fiercely undulating human nature, is strongly self-assertive and tends to prompt action, has a bountiful expressiveness and curiosity, and possesses an imagination so vivid it verge on hallucinatory vision. And it goes without saying that all these characteristics are in constant conflict with the self of idealism and justice, the fastidiousness, the self-denial, the self-control and the self-abnegation that have characterized him since his youth.

One might even say that this conflict is what creates his own complicated yet appealing character. In fact, one way people who know Miyazaki forgive some of his statements is by saying, "Well, he is, after all, a bundle of contradictions." One hiree at Studio Ghibli once said that the secret to getting along with Miya-san was as follows: "You'd better not swallow everything he tells you today as is. Tomorrow he might well tell you the opposite." [1]

History [ ]

Early life [ ].

Miyazaki was born in Tokyo, and is the second son of four brothers. His father was Katsuji Miyazaki and their family owned Miyazaki Airplane Mfg. Co., Ltd (宮崎航空機製作所 , Miyazaki Kōkūki Seisakusho ), and their factory was based in Tochigi Prefecture in Kanuma. When the Second World War began, their family was evacuated to Utsunomiya. It was here that Miyazaki stayed until his third grade of elementary school. He moved to Eifuku, Suginami, Tokyo where he studied until 4th grade of elementary school in 1950.

When he was a child, he described himself as weak and was not good at exercising. Despite his physical deficiencies, he excelled at drawing. He was an avid reader and a big fan of mangakas like Osamu Tezuka and Shigeru Sugiura. He also loved the pictures books of Tetsuji Fukushima, particularly The Devil of the Savage . When he was in third year at Toyotama High School, he grew interested in animation and was greatly influenced by Toei Animation and their film Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958). He taught himself drawing at Fumio Sato's atelier and was influenced by Impressionist painters like Paul Cézanne.

Working as an Animator [ ]

He entered Gakushuin University and joined the Children's Literature Circle (Children's Culture Study Group). While helping plan several puppet shows, he continued drawing manga with the goal of becoming a professional manga artist, but decided to move into the world of animation. After graduating from Gakushuin University, he joined Toei Animation as an animator. He struggled with the workmanlike atmosphere of Toei Animation, and never stopped his dream of being a cartoonist. He was greatly enamored by the Soviet-produced feature-length animated film Snow Queen (1957). That film, along with several others pushed Miyazaki to stick with working in animation. Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon (1965) also served as a strong inspiration for the budding young animator. He was promoted to general secretary for the Toei Animation Labor Union, and strove to improve the treatment of animators. In the fall of 1965, he married fellow Toei animator Akemi Ota at the age of 24, and later had two boys, Goro Miyazaki and Keisuke Miyazaki . He later teamed up with Isao Takahata , Yasuo Ōtsuka and Kouji Mori to work on The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun . This early masterpiece took three years (1965-1968) to complete.

In 1971, he left Toei Animation with Isao Takahata and Yoichi Kotabe and transferred to A Production to produce, Pippi Longstocking , but that project was abandoned after failing to obtain permission from the original author. Following that setback, Miyazaki and Takahata were invited by Yasuo Ōtsuka to adapt and direct Monkey Punch's Lupin the Third Part I (1971). Unfortuntely, the series suffered from a low audience viewership. Despite the broadcast ending after half a year, it served as the blueprint for subsequent spinoffs. Utilizing their experience from the failed Pippi project, Miyazaki, Takahata, Ōtsuka and Kotabe produced Panda! Go Panda and its sequel (1972, 1973). Miyazaki was in charge of screenplay, scene setting, art, original drawing, etc.

Miyazaki then transferred to Zuiyo Eizo (later Nippon Animation ) with Takahata and Kotabe, where they produced Heidi, Girl of the Alps in 1974. He was in charge of scene setting and scene composition (layout) for several of the series' episodes. The series was a big hit and achieved an average audience rating of 26.9%. This was Miyazaki's first mainstream success.

Future Boy Conan [ ]

In 1978, Miyazaki directed Future Boy Conan for NHK. While he was not credited as director in the end credits, Miyazaki's responsibilities encompassed that of a director. In trying to keep with the strict weekly broadcasting schedule, Miyazaki was not only in charge of directing, but also in storyboarding, setting, character design and mechanical design. He drew most storyboards and layouts, and the script made by the staff. The storyboard, layout, and original drawings were all checked by Isao Takahata. The series received decent viewership at the time, and is considered a classic to this day.

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro [ ]

After the release of Future Boy Conan , Yasuo Ōtsuka approached Miyzaki to direct a new Lupin III movie for Telecom Animation Film (then known as Tokyo Movie Shinsha). Thus in 1979, The Castle of Cagliostro , Miyazaki's directorial debut, was born.

Miyazaki threw himself to complete the film in record time. He worked on the film for a brief four and a half months, describing the experience as where he learnt his limitations of his physical strength. Unfortunately, due to the stylistic difference between Lupin the Third Part II and the immense popularity of science fiction animation at the time, the film was a flop at the box office. Thankfully, the film found success after it was rebroadcast on television, and is now considered an animation classic.

Immediately after this, Miyazaki found himself working on script, storyboard, and director on a handful of episodes for the ongoing Lupin III series. He worked on the series finale, which notably featured designs that would later be seen in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind . It was around this time when Miyazaki met Toshio Suzuki , who was currently working as deputy editor of Animage magazine.

With the release of the Lupin the Third Part I series, a third Lupin III movie was announced. Miyazaki was once again tapped as director, but he turned the offer down. Miyazaki instead recommended his friend Mamoru Oshii to direct.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind [ ]

Miyazaki, along with Yasuo Ōtsuka and Isao Takahata , were then involved in the US-Japan collaboration Little Nemo by Telecom Animation Film. The trio would fly back and forth to the United States, but shortly after producing a pilot film, Miyazaki and his friends decided to abandon the project. It was at this time when Miyazaki began developing concepts that would later become My Neighbor Totoro , Princess Mononoke , Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , and Castle in the Sky .

Toshio Suzuki , who fell in love with Miyazaki's talent, brought several of Miyazaki's proposal and image boards for what would be Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Tokuma Shoten (the publisher of Animage ) in order to adapt it into a film. However, Yasuyoshi Tokuma (then presiden of Tokuma Shoten) and his fellow executives rejected this as they felt it was unviable as a film if didn't have an accompanying manga. Hideo Ogata , editor-in-chief of Tokuma Shoten's Animage , who had been a fan of Miyazaki since producing Future Boy Conan , decided to use the magazine to help publish Nausicaä as a manga. In February 1982, the serialization of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind began, and eventually gained the support of many readers.

In addition, Ogata and Suzuki proposed a special short animated film to help promote Nausicaä . The project's scope gradually expanded, and thanks to Ogata's efforts, Yasuyoshi Tokuma became convinced as he was enthusiastic and dreamed of entering the movie business at the time. He decided to produce Nausicaä in an animated film, which was later released in 1984.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind proved to be a big hit, following the success of The Castle of Cagliostro as it was being broadcast on television. The film also helped spur the ecology boom at the time.

Studio Ghibli [ ]

Studio Ghibli was established in 1985 thanks to an investment from Tokuma Shoten . Subsequent film productions would also be funded by Tokuma. The initial disappointing box office returns of 1986 release of Castle in the Sky and 1988 My Neighbor Totoro were later offset thanks to the secondary merchandising sales and release on home video.

Additionally, in 1986, after Mamoru Oshii's Lupin III movie failed to get produced, Oshii was appointed as the director at Studio Ghibli. He then produced Anchor , which was written by Miyazaki. ( Anchor would also fail to get produced) [2]

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) was initially supposed to be directed by Sunao Katabuchi , but had to drop out after an issue with the sponsors. Miyazaki then took over directing duties. Kiki was Ghibli's first major box office hit, and thanks to its success, the studio was able to hire more talent and expand its operations.

Porco Rosso (1992) was originally planned as a 45 minute in-flight film for Japan Airlines, but the concept gradually expanded and it was released as a feature film. Due to the end of production on Takahata's Only Yesterday (1991), Miyazaki initially managed the production of Porco Rosso independently. The outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars in 1991 affected Miyazaki, prompting a more somber tone for the film.

For Whisper of the Heart (1995), Miyazaki was in charge of screenplay, production, executive producer, layout and original drawing.

Princess Mononoke ," which was released in 1997, was a record-breaking box office hit in Japan. Mononoke proved to be one of Ghibli's most expensive productions to date, and the stress of that work prompted Miyazaki to push for an early retirement. He returned to work shortly after.

Spirited Away was released in 2001, and was an even bigger hit in Japan and around the world. It set a new record with 23.5 million viewers, and achieved an astouding box office revenue of 30.8 billion yen. It received the highly coveted Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003. At the press conference following the completion of the film, Miyazaki once again declared his retirement saying, "It's impossible to make a feature-length anime movie anymore."

In 2004, Ghibli released Howl 's Moving Castle . It was originally supposed to be directed by Mamoru Hosoda , but Hosada dropped out due to creative differences. On its second day of release, the film counted 1.1 million viewers and the film earned 1.48 billion yen in the box office. Howl's set the second box office opening of all time in Japan. The film won the Osella Award at the Venice International Film Festival and Best Animation Award from the New York Film Critics Association. It was nominated again for an Academy Award that year. In 2005, Miyazaki received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Award for outstanding world-class filmmakers at the Venice International Film Festival. In 2006, he was selected for the Academy Awards selection committee. Miyazaki was selected twice before this, but declined because he wanted to concentrate on his creative activities.

Tales from Earthsea was released in 2006. Miyazaki worked on the original draft, layout, and original picture.

On July 19, 2008, Ponyo was released. A month after its premiere, its Japanese box office record exceeded 10 billion yen. During the production of Ponyo , Miyazaki stated that this work would the last animated film he could work on physically. However, after the movie was released, Miyazaki was shocked to learn that Howl's Moving Castle had a number of viewers than Ponyo , and this motivated him to "make another movie".

There was a time when Miyazaki didn't like to appear in front of the media, but during the creation of Ponyo , he developed a close relationship with NHK, and was featured on their program, Professional Work Style . The documentary of his process was a big hit. In addition, Miyazaki was invited to the Foreign Correspondents' Association of Japan on November 20, 2008, and enthusiastically argued about the concerns in the animation industry. In 2012, he was selected as a Person of Cultural Merit.

In 2013, he released The Wind Rises . On September 1, 2013 the same year, Studio Ghibli president Koji Hoshino announced that Miyazaki would retire from the production of feature films. He has since come out of retirement to produce The Boy and the Heron .

On May 15, 2018, he attended Isao Takahata's funeral service and read the opening remarks.

Political and Ideological Stance [ ]

Good & evil [ ].

Most of Miyazaki's films feature some sort of struggle between good and evil. For example, in The Castle of Cagliostro , Clarisse d'Cagliostro struggling to save the European Grand Duchy of Gagliostro after it is invaded by the Count Cagliostro, and in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , Nausicaä is struggling to save the Valley of the Wind after it is invaded by the Tolmekians. Also, in Castle in the Sky , Pazu must save Sheeta after she is captured by Muska .

Environment [ ]

Several of Miyazaki's film go into man's concern for nature. Such as, in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , Nausicaä spends a portion of the movie doing research to find a cure for the toxin plaguing their lands. And in Princess Mononoke , San , being raised by wolves, is very angry at men for destroying their forests.

Anti-War [ ]

Anti-War is a big theme in both Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and in Princess Mononoke . In both movies, the main characters are trying to stop all of the wars. Nausicaä wants to stop the animals from fighting, as well as the main battle against the Pejitans and the Ohmu. In Princess Mononoke , Ashitaka tries to end the conflict between Irontown and the forest.

Flight is a recurring theme in many of Miyazaki's films, with the exception of Princess Mononoke, in one form or another. In The Castle of Cagliostro , Lupin steals the Count's autogyro. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , Nausicaa uses a glider to get to places. And there are many airships in the movie, as well. There are also airships in Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso . Porco Rosso is an air delivery pilot. In Kiki's Delivery Service , Kiki regularly flies around on a broom and there is a blimp, as well as a homemade plane in the movie, too. In Spirited Away , Haku can turn into a dragon to fly around. In My Neighbor Totoro , Totoro flies around on a spinning top. And then, in Howl's Moving Castle , Howl can turn in a bird and fly around. Howl's Castle turns into a flying castle.

Visual Devices [ ]

The use of visual devices is common in all of Miyazaki's film. He will pan away from the action for a few seconds to add a momentary lull to the movie. For instance, showing raindrops hitting a rock and darkening it has been used in several of his movies.

Politics [ ]

Miyazaki's early interest in Marxism is apparent in a few of his films, such as Porco Rosso . In Castle in the Sky , the working class is portrayed in idealized terms.

The Cold War is a backdrop for The Castle of Cagliostro , where Zenigata's plan to mobilize the ICPO against Count Cagliostro fails when the Soviet and American delegates accuse each other of the counterfeiting operation. The class divide is shown in the film by contrasting the Count hosting a lavish banquet in the castle with the Japanese police eating cheap ramen outside.

Influences [ ]

Miyazaki has cited several Japanese artists as his influences, including Sanpei Shirato, Osamu Tezuka, and Soji Yamakawa. A number of Western authors have also influenced his works, including Frédéric Back, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Jean Giraud, Paul Grimault, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Yuriy Norshteyn, as well as animation studio Aardman Animations.

• Animator, Scene Designer
• Director, Storyboard, Screenplay, Character Designer
• Director, Storyboard, Screenplay
• Director, Storyboard, Screenplay, Editor
• Director, Producer, Storyboard, Screenplay
• Screenplay, Storyboard
• Project Concept
• Screen Design
• 1995 On Your Mark (ジブリ実験劇場 , Jiburi Jikkengekijō On Yua Māku )
• 2001 Koro's Big Day Out (コロの大さんぽ , Koro no Daisanpo )
• 2001 The Whale Hunt (くじらとり?, Whale Hunt )
• 2002 Mei and the Kittenbus (めいとこねこバス , Mei to Konekobasu )
• 2006 The Day I Bought a Star (星をかった日 , Hoshi wo Katta Hi )
• 2006 Looking for a Home (やどさがし , Yadosagashi )
• 2006 Water Spider Monmon (水グモもんもん , Mizugumo Monmon )
• 2010 Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess (パン種とタマゴ姫 , Pandane to Tamago Hime )
• 2011 Treasure Hunting (たからさがし , Takara-sagashi )
• 2018 Boro the Caterpillar (毛虫のボロ , Kemushi no Boro )
• Assistant Animator
• Based on the comics for girls by Fujio Akatsuka (赤塚不二夫)
• Based on the comics by Monkey Punch (モンキー・パンチ)
• Worked with Isao Takahata , Animator
• Character Draft
• Based on the novel of Johanna Spyri
• Scene Setting Screen Configuration
• Based on the novel of Ouida
• Based on one episode in the novel Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis
• Screenplay, Storyboard, Mechanical Design
• 1977 Rascal the Raccoon (Fuji TV, Nippon Animation)
• Director, Storyboard, Character Designer
• 1984 Sherlock Hound (探偵ホームズ, Meitantei Hōmuzu )

Other Works [ ]

Manga, image boards [ ].

• Puss in Boots
• People of the Desert
• Animal Treasure Island
• To My Sister (Collected in The World of Hayao Miyazaki and Yasuo Ōtsuka )
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (7 volumes)
• The Journey of Shuna
• Run Two Horsepower Run From The Wind (NAVI, December 1989 and CAR GRAPHIC , August 2010 issue)
• Meal in the Air (JAL WINDS, June 1994)
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Watercolor Painting Collection
• Princess Mononoke
• The Age of the Flying Boat (Dainippon Painting 1992, Supplementary Revised Edition 2004)
• Hayao Miyazaki's Miscellaneous Notes (Dainippon Painting 1992, Supplementary Revised Edition 1997)
• The Youngest Brother of an Unknown Giant
• The Spirit of the Iron
• Multi-gun Tower Comes into Play
• Farmer's Eyes
• Dragon Armor
• Heavy Bomber over Kyushu
• Special Aircraft Carrier Yasumatsu Maru Monogatari
• Over London 1918
• The Poorest front
• Hayao Miyazaki's Daydream Data Notes (Dainippon Painting August 2002)
• Hans's Return
• Muddy Tiger
• Edited by Hayao Miyazaki, translated by Mizuhito Kanehara (Iwanami Shoten, 2006)
• Translation by Kinpara Mizujin, Kaori Nozawa (Iwanami Shoten, March 2009)
• Serialized in Model Graphics )

Design Work [ ]

• Wondership TVCM of Hitachi's Maxell New Gold Videotape
• Pochette Dragon TVCM of Hitachi's PC H2
• Ghost Ship in the live-action film Red Crow and the Ghost Ship
• Nandarō for Nippon Television Network
• Kanabee for the Kanagawa Dream National Athletic Meet
• Carrying You ( Castle in the Sky theme song)
• My Neighbor Totoro ( My Neighbor Totoro theme song)
• Le Chemin du Ven ( My Neighbor Totoro insert song)
• Country Road ( Whisper of the Heart theme song)
• Baron no Uta ( Whisper of the Heart image album)
• Princess Mononoke ( Princess Mononoke theme song)
• Tatara Song ( Princess Mononoke insert song)

Books, Interviews [ ]

• Picture collection, Hisashi Wada, Asahi Shimbun (1991), Iwanami Shoten (January 2011)
• Picture book, co-authored with Tokiko Kato , Tokuma Shoten (1992)

The Wind of the Times

• Dialogue with Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshie Hotta, UPU (1992), Asahi Bunko Bunko (1997)
• Interview with Akira Kurosawa, Studio Ghibli (1993)
• Co-authored by Miyazaki, Kodansha Culture Books (1994)
• Essays, Tokuma Shoten (1996)
• Co-authored by Miyazaki, Shunposha (1998)
• Interview with Takeshi Yoro, Studio Ghibli (2002), Shincho Bunko (February 2008)
• Interview collection by Yoichi Shibuya, Rockin'on (2002), Bungei Ghibli Bunko (November 2013)
• Essays, Iwanami Shoten (2008)
• Introduction of 50 Recommended Books) Iwanami Shinsho Color Edition (October 2011)
• Interview with Kazutoshi Hando, Bungei Ghibli Bunko (August 2013)
• Interview collection by Yoichi Shibuya, Rockin'on (2013)

Cover Illustration [ ]

• Chesterton's 1984 / New Napoleon Kitan (Gilbert Chesterton), Shunjusha Publishing (1984)
• The Witches of Kares on the Planet (James Henry Schmitz ), Shincho Bunko (1987), Sogen Suiri Bunko (1996)
• Night Flight (Saint Exupery), Shincho Bunko (1993, revised 2012) * New cover
• Human Land (Saint Exupery), Shincho Bunko (1998, revised 2012) * New cover
• Midnight Phone (Robert Westall), Tokuma Shoten (2014)
• Call of a Far Day (Robert Westall), Tokuma Shoten (2014)
• Ghost Tower (Ranpo Edogawa), Iwanami Shoten (2015)

References [ ]

• ↑ "Turning Point 1979-1996]", Afterword
• ↑ "Momoru Oshii Interview", Nausicaa

External links [ ]

• Miyazaki, H. (2009). Starting Point 1979-1996 . San Francisco: VIZ Media. (Translated by Cary, B. & Schodt, F.L.)

11 Facts About Hayao Miyazaki

Considered the Walt Disney of Japan , manga artist, animator, and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki is known for transporting audiences to new magical worlds with his enchanting stories, lovable and memorable characters, and a gorgeous animation style.

From his 1979 directorial debut, The Castle of Cagliostro , to the yet-to-be-released How Do You Live? , Miyazaki has been dazzling audiences of all ages for nearly 60 years. He’s a master of the form and one of the most influential artists from Japan. Here are 11 facts you should know about the iconic filmmaker.

1. Aviation plays a role in many of Hayao Miyazaki's movies.

Hayao Miyazaki's father was the director of Miyazaki Airplane, a manufacturing company that built rudders and other fighter plane parts for the Japanese government during World War II. His family's background in aviation became a passion for Miyazaki , and many of his films feature themes of taking flight , including 1988's My Neighbor Totoro , 1989's Kiki’s Delivery Service , 1992 Porco Rosso , and more.

In fact, 2013's The Wind Rises is an animated biopic about Jiro Horikoshi , the engineer and designer of the Japanese Mitsubishi A5M and Mitsubishi A6M Zero flyers used during World War II.

2. Hayao Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985.

On June 15, 1985, Hayao Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli with Grave of the Fireflies (1988) director Isao Takahata , Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) producers Toshio Suzuki and Yasuyoshi Tokuma, and Miyazaki’s son, Gorō Miyazaki.

True to Miyazaki’s love of aviation, Studio Ghibli is named after the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli military plane used during Italy’s occupation of Africa during World War II. According to the company, the word ghibli is Italian for " hot desert wind ," and the name was chosen because the founders wanted to create a film studio that would "blow a new wind through the anime industry."

3. Hayao Miyazaki refused to attend the Academy Awards in 2003.

Despite winning the Oscar for Best Animated Film for 2001's Spirited Away (the first and only foreign-language winner in the category to date), Hayao Miyazaki refused to attend the 75th Academy Awards in 2003 due to the outbreak of the Iraq War, which started a few days beforehand.

"It is regrettable that I cannot rejoice from my heart over the prize because of the deeply sad events taking place in the world," Miyazaki wrote in a handwritten statement . "However, I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to all my friends who have lent their effort in releasing ‘Spirited Away’ in the United States and to all those who have shown their appreciation of the movie."

4. Hayao Miyazaki also directed a music video.

In the middle of production on Princess Mononoke in 1995, Miyazaki wrote and directed an animated music video for Japanese rock duo Chage and Aska’s song "On Your Mark," as a part of a Ghibli Experimental Theater side project. The seven-minute music video is set in a Blade Runner -esque sci-fi world and follows two cops during a raid of a religious cult’s temple, while government officials then take an angel hiding inside. Later, the pair rescue the angel held captive inside of a nuclear reactor.

5. Hayao Miyazaki has already "retired" twice

Miyazaki retired from filmmaking after the release of The Wind Rises in 2013, but he returned in 2016 to direct a short film called Boro the Caterpillar for the Studio Ghibli Museum. Soon after, Miyazaki also started production on How Do You Live? , a brand-new feature film that he wanted to make for his grandson. In 2020, Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki told Entertainment Weekly that the studio is basically finishing one minute of animation on the movie per month, with hopes of a 2023 release.

Miyazaki is no stranger to brief retirements from filmmaking. In 1997, he announced Princess Mononoke would be his final film, but he was back directing movies a few years later with Spirited Away in 2001.

6. There's a worm named after a Hayao Miyazaki character.

In 2007 , a group of Russian zoologists discovered a new velvet worm species in Cát Tiên National Park in Vietnam. And because of its caterpillar-like shape and multiple stumpy legs, researchers named it Eoperipatus totoro after the Catbus in Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro .

7. Hayao Miyazaki teamed up with the iconic schlock studio, Troma Entertainment, for My Neighbor Totoro .

Five years after its release in Japan, My Neighbor Totoro was released in the United States in 1993. Studio Ghibli struck a deal with low-budget genre movie company Troma Entertainment —known for B-movie cult classics like The Toxic Avenger , Cannibal! The Musical , Tromeo and Juliet , and Surf Nazis Must Die —for U.S. distribution. This would be the first time a Miyazaki film got a wide release in the States.

8. Hayao Miyazaki doesn't work from a script first.

The animation in Miyazaki’s films is elaborate and detailed, but the Japanese filmmaker doesn’t like to write a screenplay before he starts making a new movie. Instead, Miyazaki finds the story through creating storyboards.

"I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time," Miyazaki said to Midnight Eye in 2002. "So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keep working on the film as it develops. It's a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that's the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it."

9. Hayao Miyazaki will mail you a samurai sword if you try to cut his movies.

In 1997, Miramax acquired the rights to distribute Princess Mononoke in North America. However, executives at the film company were notorious for acquiring foreign films and re-editing them for American audiences, and they wanted to cut the film down from 133 minutes to just 90 minutes. To make their feelings on the matter clear, Miyazaki and his producer sent executives a samurai sword with a simple message attached: " No cuts ." Miramax ended up releasing Princess Mononoke at its full running time (though, for the record, Miyazaki puts most of the blame on his producer for the stunt).

10. The Simpsons paid homage to Hayao Miyazaki.

After announcing his retirement in 2013, animators on The Simpsons paid tribute to Miyazaki with an elaborate sequence that featured references to nearly all of his movies—including Otto as the aforementioned Catbus—in the season 25 episode "Married to the Blob."

11. Hayao Miyazaki is known to whip up ramen for his production team.

During the making of Spirited Away , Miyazaki and his production team would work long days and late nights to meet the film’s release date. To boost morale every night, there would be an 11 p.m. staff meal break with a different member of the team preparing the meal for the rest of the crew—even Miyazaki who would make his " Poor Man's Salt-Flavored Ramen ," which includes loads of instant noodles, eggs, and fresh vegetables.

The Auteur of Anime

The building that houses the Ghibli Museum would be unusual anywhere, but in greater Tokyo, where architectural exuberance usually takes an angular, modernist form—black glass cubes, busy geometries of neon—it is particularly so. From the outside, the museum resembles an oversized adobe house, with slightly melted edges; its exterior walls are painted in saltwater-taffy shades of pink, green, and yellow. Inside, the museum looks like a child’s fantasy of Old Europe submitted to a rigorous Arts and Crafts sensibility. The floors are dark polished wood; stained-glass windows cast candy-colored light on whitewashed walls; a spiral stairway climbs—inside what looks like a giant Victorian birdcage—to a rooftop garden of wild grasses, over which a hammered-metal robot soldier stands guard. In the central hall, beneath a high ceiling, a web of balconies and bridges suggests a dream vision of a nineteenth-century factory. Wrought-iron railings contain balls of colored glass, and leaded-glass lanterns are attached to the walls by wrought-iron vines. In the entryway, a fresco on the ceiling depicts a sky of Fra Angelico blue and a smiling sun wreathed in fruits and vegetables.

Situated in a park on the outskirts of Tokyo, the Ghibli Museum is dedicated to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the most beloved director in Japan today, and—especially since his film “Spirited Away” won the Oscar for best animated film, in 2002—perhaps the most admired animation director in the world. Miyazaki’s zeal for craft and beauty has set a new standard for animated films. With few exceptions, we seldom know the names of directors of children’s films, but if you have seen a Miyazaki film you know his name. He not only draws characters and storyboards for the films he directs; he also writes the rich, strange screenplays, which blend Japanese mythology with modern psychological realism. He is, in short, an auteur of children’s entertainment, perhaps the world’s first.

Miyazaki designed the Ghibli himself. The museum was partly funded by his movie studio—after which it is named—and is now a hugely popular, self-sustaining attraction. Though the museum is intended for children, who might be supposed not to care so much for beauty per se, it is, in nearly every detail, beautiful. A reproduction of the cat-shaped bus in Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), which is large enough for children to climb on, has glowing golden eyes, and fur both soft and bristly, like a caterpillar’s. The museum showcases not only the visual splendor of Miyazaki’s films but also what inspires them: among other things, a sense of wonder about the natural world; a fascination with flight; a curiosity about miniature or hidden realms. When I visited the museum this summer, it struck me as one of the few kid-oriented attractions I know that take seriously the notion of children as natural aesthetes—in part because it portrays for them a creative life that they might plausibly lead as adults.

One typical exhibit, “Where a Film Begins,” depicts a room in which a young boy dreams up an idea for a movie. The room is supposed to be a study inherited from the imaginary boy’s grandfather, and the mise en scène captures an idealized, slightly antique coziness; a glass jar of colored pencils sits atop a wooden desk, and worn tapestry pillows rest on a library chair. The display conjures a creative young mind’s half-glimpsed notions and sudden enthusiasms: models of a flying dinosaur and a red biplane hang from the ceiling; thick books about birds and fish and the history of aviation occupy the bookshelves. As sentimental as it is, this room makes you think with pleasure about the dreamy stage that often precedes the making of art. Standing amid its congenial clutter, a child visitor can easily grasp how it is, as Miyazaki writes in the museum’s catalogue, that “imagination and premonition” and “sketches and partial images” can become “the core of a film.” Indeed, “Spirited Away,” the story of a sullen ten-year-old girl who finds herself transported from an abandoned theme park into a ravishing spirit world, was inspired in part by Miyazaki’s own visit to a peculiar outdoor attraction—a Tokyo museum where old Japanese buildings, including a splendid bathhouse, had been carted from their original locations.

Miyazaki is detail-oriented to the point of obsession—he travelled to Portugal just to look at a painting by Hieronymus Bosch that had long haunted him, and sent Michiyo Yasuda, the color designer for his films, to Alsace to scout hues for his latest movie—and so, too, is his museum. For the in-house theatre, which shows short films that he makes especially for the museum (including a sequel to “My Neighbor Totoro”), he hired an acoustic designer to create an uncommonly gentle sound system. Miyazaki wanted the opposite of the “tendency in recent Hollywood films,” which is “to use heavy bass to try to pull the audience into the film.” He thinks that movie theatres can be claustrophobic, even overwhelming places for young children, so he wanted his theatre to have windows that let in some natural light, bench-style seats that a child can’t sink into, and films that make them “sigh in relaxation.” Miyazaki fondly remembered the days when cigarette smoke in a theatre could draw your attention to the beam of light stretching from the projector, so he placed the projector in a glass booth that protrudes into the seating area. “I want to show children that moving images are enjoyed by having huge reels revolving, an electric light shining on the film, and a lot of complicated things being done,” he explains in the museum’s catalogue. Colleagues told him that projecting the films digitally would help preserve them, but Miyazaki relished the idea that, eventually, viewers might see “worn film with ‘falling-rain’ scratches on the screen.”

To plan the menu for the museum café, Miyazaki hired not a professional chef but a woman who was a good home cook and had raised four children: he wanted homemade bread; katosand, breaded pork-cutlet sandwiches; and fresh vegetable soup. When he heard that children were prying open the little windows on a model of a house in the museum, and had broken the shutters, he was delighted, and placed pictures inside the house for kids to see. He painted several large murals—one of a commissary, another of an old animation studio—himself. Some of Miyazaki’s ideas could not be realized. He had wanted to make a mountain of dirt at the Ghibli Museum—a mountain with muddy, slippery stretches where children “would fall and get scolded by their mothers.” He had liked the idea, too, of a spiral staircase that gently swayed when you walked up it. These notions were eventually deemed unsafe or impractical, but, over all, the museum still feels stubbornly, and joyfully, idiosyncratic.

Despite Miyazaki’s fame—his latest film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” grossed a record $14.5 million in its first week of release in Japan—he almost never grants formal interviews. Yet a few days after I visited the museum I was lucky enough to run into him during a tour of his nearby studio, and he began chatting amiably. It immediately became apparent why he was compelled to create imaginary worlds. A spry, slim man of sixty-three, with silver hair, parenthesis-shaped dimples, and thick, expressive black eyebrows, Miyazaki betrayed a profound dissatisfaction with modern life. He complained, “Everything is so thin and shallow and fake.” He lamented the fact that children had become disconnected from nature, and fulminated about the deadening impact of video games on the imagination. Only half in jest, he said that he was hoping for the day when “developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer, and wild grasses take over.” And the conversation grew only darker from there. A man disappointed, even infuriated, by the ugliness surrounding him, Miyazaki is devoted to making whatever he can control—a museum, each frame of a film—as gorgeous as it can be.

John Lasseter, the director of “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life,” is an ardent fan, and a friend, of Miyazaki’s. He recently visited the Ghibli Museum with his sons. “You know how when you’re watching a movie, you’ll say, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that before’? With his films, that happens in every sequence,” he said. “And he has such a big heart; his characters and his worlds are so rich. The museum is like having a place to visit those worlds. It’s like when Disneyland first opened, in the fifties—visitors must have felt, in a very pure way, like they had walked inside a Disney film.”

People have been invoking Miyazaki and Disney in the same breath for a long time, and in some ways it is an apt comparison. Miyazaki films are as popular in Japan as Disney films are in America. (“Spirited Away” is Japan’s highest-grossing movie ever.) Miyazaki-inspired merchandise—such as plush versions of the Totoro, a rotund woodland creature of Miyazaki’s devising—is nearly as ubiquitous in Japan as Disney stuff is here. Like Walt Disney, Hayao Miyazaki started his professional career drawing animation cels and rose to head an independent cartoon empire with a tentacular hold on kids’ imaginations.

Yet, in themes and style, Miyazaki’s eight films do not much resemble the Disney œuvre. Unlike Disney movies—so many of which are based on familiar fairy tales—Miyazaki’s films are either original stories or his own adaptations of fairly obscure works. Though they contain set pieces of suspenseful action—he is particularly fond of airship battles and dramatic rescues in the sky—they have a much quieter, less frenetic feel. In part, this is because they are not musicals: no brassy showstoppers or treacly ballads interrupt the narratives. Moreover, his films rarely have villains of the scenery-chewing, extravagantly black-hearted Disney variety. Miyazaki sometimes forgoes villains altogether—as in “Totoro” and the charming “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989), the story of an apprentice witch—making you forget what a fixture they are in other children’s films. His is not a black-and-white moral universe: he has sympathy for the vain and the gluttonous and the misguided, a bemused tolerance for the poor creatures we all are. Some of his characters can be threatening or unappealing, but also complex and capable of change—like the moody young wizard in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which will be released here later this year. It might be said that Miyazaki’s malevolent characters are capable of redemption, except that redemption is too Christian an idea: it’s more that they prove capable of a kind of shape-shifting, which allows them to reveal a different facet of themselves.

The absence of villains also means a refreshing absence of perfect and perfectly pretty heroines, their lives arcing toward romance. Miyazaki’s protagonists are usually girls, and though they are likable and loyal, they tend to be ordinary children—which makes them extraordinary in the world of children’s films. Miyazaki dwells on the latent phase of childhood, so that his girl characters are often close friends with boys. And they can be bratty and grievously sad, as well as plucky and resourceful.

In “My Neighbor Totoro,” one of the loveliest children’s films ever made, two sisters, Mei and Satsuki, are not idealized; they are at once goofy, brave, and vulnerable, like a lot of kids. The sisters have just moved with their father to a new house in rural Japan. Gradually, the two girls discover a host of strange but benign woodland creatures: fuzzy little soot sprites that hang out in old houses and hide when you turn on the lights; the plump, whiskered Totoros, who live in the roots of a giant camphor tree; and the marvellous cat bus, with its headlight eyes, caramel-colored stripes, and extra legs that function as wheels. (In a 1993 televised discussion between Miyazaki and the director Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa mentioned how much he admired the sweetly surreal cat bus.) There is a gentle hint of Shintoism in all this: the father, an anthropologist, respectfully accepts the notion that the forest is presided over by spirits, though he is no longer able to see them, as his children can. Unlike the animals in most American cartoons, these creatures are not excessively anthropomorphized; they don’t speak, which somehow makes them seem both more plausible and more dignified, and which gives the girls the delightful challenge of interpreting them. In fact, the film is focussed on dignifying the girls’ imaginations, honoring their ability to partake in a fantasy that is both comforting and fortifying—for we gradually learn that they are separated from their mother, who is ill and in the hospital.

The tone of the film is dreamy and playful—it has the sun-soaked colors and languid pace of a summer afternoon in the country—but the way it melds such elements with a subtle psychological treatment of the children’s anxiety over their mother makes it a radical film. When four-year-old Mei learns that her mother won’t be coming home for a visit as planned, her grief takes the form of a tantrum. She howls—her mouth a black cavern, her arms stiff. (In Disney movies, children weep decorously or break into poignant song.) Satsuki, panicked and struggling to be the mature sister, shouts at her not to be so “stupid”; Mei runs away to the hospital to find her mother. Both girls are ultimately rescued by the cat bus, which opens up a warm, golden, womb-like interior to them—an entrancing image of solace—and bounds across the countryside to return them to their father. Miyazaki is a master at conveying emotions as a child would experience them: obliquely, often physically, with a thread of magical thinking that promotes resilience.

Miyazaki’s films are also striking for their preoccupation with the environment, and their not entirely metaphorical suggestion that the natural world is capable of remembering what’s been done to it. (He believes that we harbor “memories in our DNA from before we took the form of humans.”) “Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind” (1984) is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans live huddled on the edge of a toxic forest. Its heroine finds beauty in the lush, strangely colored undergrowth and the giant cicada-like insects that dwell there, nursing a grudge against the humans who’ve poisoned their habitat.

Miyazaki began his animation career in the nineteen-sixties, at a time when the economic miracle that had swiftly transformed postwar Japan into one of the strongest economies of the world was, almost as swiftly, obliterating its countryside. In the nineteen-eighties, the government cleaned up the worst industrial pollution, but Japan is still a country where developers (especially golf-resort planners) have free rein, where most people prefer nature in tamed and miniaturized form (bonsai, Zen gardens, lavishly packaged tiny melons), and where few places are untouched by commerce (there are vending machines on Mt. Fuji). “Spirited Away” contains a memorable scene in which a gloppy-looking creature—the spirit of a polluted river—comes to a bathhouse to be cleansed; a lot of dirty, foul-smelling labor is required. For this sequence, Miyazaki drew on his own memories of cleaning up a river—and pulling things like bicycles out of the muck.

Miyazaki’s movies are threaded with other personal obsessions, just as samurai imagery pervades Kurosawa’s work. Pigs, for example, turn up in many films. (“The behavior of pigs is very similar to human behavior,” Miyazaki has said. “I really like pigs at heart, for their strengths as well as their weaknesses.”) A 1992 film, “Porco Rosso,” tells the story of a pig that flies—he’s a pilot who works the skies over the Adriatic before the Second World War. In one tender scene, the pig recalls the air battle in which his fellow flying aces just kept ascending—floating ever upward into a cold empyrean death—while he, a more earthbound creature, could not face such self-sacrifice. Next month, Disney, the American distributor of Miyazaki’s films, will release a video version of “Porco,” whose title character will be voiced by Michael Keaton. It will also make available an English version of “Nausicäa,” with voices by Uma Thurman and Patrick Stewart. With these two releases, the entirety of Miyazaki’s eccentric output will be available in good English versions for the first time.

John Lasseter told me that when the animators at Pixar get stuck on a project they go into a screening room and watch a Miyazaki film. The irony of this admiration is that Miyazaki is an old-fashioned artist who has rejected the computerized path that many animation studios, including Pixar, have taken. (Last year, Disney closed down its hand-drawn-animation unit, in Florida, in favor of digitally rendered work.) Though Miyazaki incorporates some computer graphics in his films, he insists that all his characters and backgrounds be drawn by hand.

Toshio Suzuki, a wry, articulate man with close-cropped silver hair and an elfin grin, is Miyazaki’s producer and longtime collaborator. “When silents moved to talkies, Chaplin held out the longest,” he told me. “When black-and-white went to color, Kurosawa held out the longest. Miyazaki feels he should be the one to hold out the longest when it comes to computer animation.” Miyazaki lavishes particular attention on his backgrounds, which are full of painterly flourishes. I’d never really noticed the colors in an animated film until I noticed his. Skies and seas are saturated in strangely emotional blues; wet halos surround the red lanterns and absinthe-green neon signs in “Spirited Away”; in “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” the young witch’s dress isn’t quite black—it’s the smudged purple of the darkest plums.

Even Miyazaki’s most outlandishly imagined creatures have an unnerving realism. The eerie, poignant No Face in “Spirited Away” is a creature who wears a mask, whimpers softly, and eats everything in sight, greedily eager for communion with others; he glides along like an inky rain cloud, and expands just as ominously. In the same film, a flock of white paper birds flash through the sky: they are like origami, only sharp-edged, and capable of drawing blood.

Miyazaki’s starting point for a film, Suzuki said, is often a small visual detail. Five years ago, when Miyazaki read a Japanese translation of the book “Howl’s Moving Castle,” by Diana Wynne Jones, a British author, he was immediately taken with the idea of a castle that ambulates around the countryside. “The book never explains how it moves, and that triggered his imagination,” Suzuki recalled. “He wanted to solve that problem. The first thing he did on the film was to start to design the castle. How would it move? It must have legs, and he was obsessed with settling this question. Would they be Japanese warrior legs? Human-type feet? One day, he suddenly said, ‘Let’s go with chicken feet!’ That was, for him, the breakthrough.” Suzuki thinks of Miyazaki’s approach as uniquely Japanese: “In traditional Japanese architecture, you start with one room—maybe the alcove, where you hang some pictures. You spend a lot of time trying to pick the right shelves, the right little pillar, what kind of handles the drawers will have. Only when you finish that room do you worry about the next. In the West, you start from the general and go to the specific. A Hitchcock movie might start off with a panorama of the city, and then the camera closes in on a street, and a house, and then the stairway inside. If you’re a Japanese filmmaker, you might start with the railing on the stairway. When Miyazaki makes a film, he is thinking, like with this new one, O.K., first off, here are two very important points to settle: Does Sophie, the little girl in the movie, have braids or not? Are they long or short?”

But it wouldn’t be quite right to describe Miyazaki’s approach as wholly Japanese. As with fantasy writers in the British tradition, from C. S. Lewis to J. K. Rowling, Miyazaki makes the details of the worlds he creates concrete and coherent, so that we might better suspend our disbelief for the big leaps of fantasy. This devotion to realism, Suzuki acknowledges, “is rare in Japanese animation,” which tends to revel in the freedom from earthly laws that the medium allows. Miyazaki can be steely in pursuit of this goal. In a Japanese television documentary about “Spirited Away,” he is shown at a meeting with his young staff, explaining how they are to draw certain images based on his storyboards. “The dragon is supposed to fall from down the air vent, but, being a dragon, it doesn’t land on the ground,” Miyazaki says. “It attaches itself to the wall, like a gecko. And then—ow!—it falls—thud!—it should fall like a serpent. Have you ever seen a snake fall out of a tree?” He explains that it “doesn’t slither, but holds its position.” He looks around at the animators, most of whom appear to be in their twenties and early thirties. They are taking notes, looking grave: nobody has seen a snake fall out of a tree.

Miyazaki goes on to describe how the dragon—a protean creature named Haku, who sometimes takes this form—struggles when he is pinned down. “This will be tricky,” Miyazaki says, smiling. “If you want to get an idea, go to an eel restaurant and see how an eel is gutted.” The director wriggles around in his seat, imitating the action of a recalcitrant eel. “Have you ever seen an eel resisting?” Miyazaki asks.

“No, actually,” admits a young man with hipster glasses, an orange sweatshirt, and an indoor pallor.

Miyazaki groans. “Japanese culture is doomed!” he says. When he describes a scene in which his heroine, Chihiro, forces open the dragon’s mouth to give it medicine, he says the animators should be thinking, as they draw, of what it’s like to feed a dog a pill, when you tip its head to the side, and “the dog clenches its teeth and its gums stick out.” There is more note-taking, but no sign that this might be a familiar experience.

“Any of you ever had a dog?” Miyazaki asks.

“I had a cat,” somebody volunteers.

“This is pathetic,” Miyazaki says. The documentary shows the chastened staff making a field trip that night to a veterinary hospital, videotaping a golden retriever’s gums and teeth, and then returning to the studio to study the video.

It seems almost inevitable that the world’s greatest animator should be Japanese. Over the past decade or so, Japan has become, outside the United States, the most successful exporter of children’s pop culture. With television shows like “Pokémon” and “Yu-Gi-Oh!,” which have large casts of creatures accompanied by their own stats and trading cards, the Japanese figured out how to tap into children’s mania for collecting and classifying. With shows like “Hamtaro” (“Little Hamsters, Big Adventures”) and “Sailor Moon” (in which giggly, shopaholic schoolgirls turn into saviors of the world), they got the idea that overmuscled superheroes, as alluring as they are, can seem out of reach, whereas smaller creatures that are simultaneously cute and powerful are easy to identify with. With Hello Kitty—the blank, big-headed cartoon cat—they proved that innocence was an aesthetic that could be pushed to extremes. Sanrio, the company that manufactures tens of thousands of Hello Kitty products—from pink vinyl coin purses to packets of “sweet squid chunks” bearing her wide-eyed likeness—is a billion-dollar business.

One reason the Japanese are so good at this kind of thing is that many adults in Japan are curiously attuned to cuteness. Even in a cosmopolitan city like Tokyo, kawaii —or “cute” culture—is everywhere: road signs are adorned with adorable raccoons and bunnies; stuffed animals sit on salarymen’s desks; Hello Kitty charms are offered for sale at Shinto shrines. It is also a culture where anime (cartoons) and manga (comic books) are both widely consumed and, in some cases, highly regarded as art and literature. No one knows exactly why comic books are so popular in Japan; one theory is that they grew out of woodblock prints and seemed naturally connected to a broader artistic tradition that produced some of its best work on ephemeral, everyday objects like fans and screens. In any case, manga make up nearly half of the book sales in Japan, and you see people of all ages reading them on the subway. Animated programs, of which ninety or so air on Japanese TV every week, have long been shown in prime time, on the assumption that families will watch them together. And while much anime and manga is intended for adults—violent sci-fi and pornography, as well as contemplative family dramas—the market for children remains the largest. Although much of Japan’s kid-oriented anime has been exported to the U.S., a great deal more—such as “Anpanman,” a hugely popular series about a bean-paste-stuffed bread roll—has not. (A fan Web site notes, “To a non-Japanese person, the concept of a living bread superman who fights giant germs and feeds the hungry with pieces of his head may seem bizarre.”)

Miyazaki distances himself from all this commercialism. He doesn’t care for a lot of contemporary Japanese animation. “Animators are getting too old,” he told me. “Animation used to be for young people. Now people in their forties are the ones who are supporting it.” When he watches movies at all these days, he said, he prefers documentaries, especially “the simple ones that just try to show other people and other civilizations. They have their own distortions, but, still, I like them.” He is a leftist who thinks that too many people are making money off children, who frets over the spectre of virtual reality “eating into our emotional life,” and who wishes that we could drastically reduce the number of video games and DVDs available for sale. He worries that he is contributing to the problem by making anime himself, and isn’t keen on promoting his own films, which is one reason that he resists giving interviews.

Several people who know Miyazaki told me that mothers frequently approach him to tell him that their child watches “Totoro” or “Kiki” every day, and he always acts horrified. “Don’t do that!” he will say. “Let them see it once a year, at most!” In an essay he wrote in 1987, he was already concerned: “No matter how we may think of ourselves as conscientious, it is true that images such as anime stimulate only the visual and auditory sensations of children, and deprive them of the world they go out to find, touch, and taste.” And yet he would not be quite the figure he is—recognized by children on the street, in a position to make just about any movie he wants—in a country that did not honor animation and fetishize childhood quite so much.

Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941. His father helped run a family-owned factory that made parts for military airplanes. His mother, like the mother in “Totoro,” was sickly and often bedridden, but she was also smart and strong-willed. “My grandfather was affluent, and he knew how to live,” Goro Miyazaki, one of the director’s two sons, recalled. I spoke with him last summer at the Ghibli Museum, where he is the curator. “He liked to have fun—he liked to go to restaurants and movies. My grandmother was very intelligent and not particularly interested in going out. She had her own mind and she didn’t like to spend money. She exerted a huge influence on Miyazaki. When he was young, he had all these questions—big ideas—and it was his mother he could talk to about them. He was one of four boys, and he was the closest to her.”

His friend Suzuki was more direct.“He was a mama’s boy,” he said. Suzuki thinks the fact that there is always an old woman in Miyazaki’s films, and that she is often a trenchant character, is a tribute to the director’s mother. “When he was small, and his mother was ill, the four brothers took turns helping out with chores. But he loved her the best of all of them.” (Like the tough grannies in his movies, Miyazaki’s mother surprised everyone by living into old age.)

Neither of Miyazaki’s parents was artistic. “My grandfather liked buying paintings, and he liked to show them off to guests,” Goro Miyazaki said. “But I don’t know that he had any particular artistic understanding. It’s a mystery where Miyazaki’s talent came from. He had a kind of a complex toward his brothers, and that gave him a strong motivation to succeed at animation. His brothers went into business; they were more influenced by their father. But success wasn’t easy for him. He wasn’t dexterous, and he really had to work to achieve what he has.”

At Gakushuin University, in Tokyo, Miyazaki studied economics and political science. But he also joined a children’s-literature group, where members read and discussed fantasy fiction. As a senior in high school, Miyazaki had sneaked out to see the first Japanese animated film made in color, “The Legend of the White Snake,” when he was supposed to be studying for his entrance exams. The film had a big impact on him, he wrote years later, because while he could see that it was “cheap melodrama,” its naked emotionalism touched him. “My soul was moved and I stumbled back home in the snow that had just started. Comparing my pitiful situation to the characters’ earnestness, I was ashamed of myself, and cried all night.” At the time, he had been trying to write a sophisticated, absurdist manga, but he realized, somewhat to his embarrassment, that he was more interested in creating something sincere.

In 1963, Miyazaki went to work as a rookie animator at Toei Animation, in Tokyo, which primarily made cartoons for television. The company’s animation had a particular style—the style we associate with anime in general, though not so much with Miyazaki—and it derived mainly from economic necessity. Japanese studios were not the wealthy behemoths that Disney and Warner Bros. were, and they saved money by having animators draw fewer cels. The result was jerkier, with more stilted movements and longer closeups, in which faces often filled the screens: a kind of cut-rate Expressionism. The big, round eyes that Westerners associate with anime became signatures then—the legacy of Osamu Tezuka, the comic artist who, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, drew Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. (One theory is that Tezuka was influenced by Betty Boop, who was very popular in Japan.) Miyazaki admired the soulful Tezuka, but his influences were more cosmopolitan: he loved Chagall, Bosch, and the Russian animators Lev Atamanov and Yuri Norstein, who made bewitching animations based on Russian folktales. His image of Japan was so shaken by memories of the country’s postwar devastation that for years afterward, he told Kurosawa, his imagination turned reflexively to Europe—a fantasy version, stitched together in his mind, that had never experienced the Second World War. (In his films, Europe looks like a harmonious amalgam of Scandinavia, Alsace, and the Amalfi coast, with a bit of Dalmatia tossed in.)

At Toei, Miyazaki met Akemi Ota, an animator, whom he married in 1965, and who decided to stay at home when the couple’s two sons were young. (Goro, who was a landscape designer before going to work at the Ghibli Museum, was born in 1967; Keisuke, an artist who makes intricate wood engravings, was born two years later.) On his first job at Toei, Miyazaki also met Isao Takahata, an animation director with an intellectual bent, who had graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in French literature; and Michiyo Yasuda, the gifted color designer, who went on to work on most of his films. The three of them were officials of the animation workers’ union, and spent a lot of time during union meetings discussing their own artistic futures, which they were determined to entwine. “It wasn’t too philosophical—more practical,” Takahata recalled. “‘O.K., you’re drawing a robot. It’s got to be heavy. What kind of holes does it make in the ground when it moves?’ We talked a lot about the challenges of depicting things correctly.”

In the seventies, Miyazaki and Takahata both took jobs at Nippon Animation. Between 1974 and 1979, Miyazaki was a key artist or scene designer for five of Takahata’s television series, including “Heidi,” and worked on a film for television that Takahata directed: “Panda! Go Panda!,” a funny, sweet movie featuring a spirited, pigtailed, pug-faced little girl—the precursor of Miyazaki’s own heroines. “She was modelled on Pippi Longstocking,” Yasuo Ohtsuka, an animator who worked with Miyazaki on several projects, said. “Miyazaki wanted to draw an audacious, energetic little girl—they’re just a lot more fun to draw. We thought of her as a girl from American or European literature, because Japanese girls aren’t—or weren’t, anyway—all that high-spirited.”

Miyazaki is a workaholic, and that tendency was in full force by then. “When I was small, he would come home at 2 a . m . and get up at 8 a . m . and do TV series all year round,” Goro Miyazaki recalled. “It was very rare for me to see him. Every morning, I’d look into my father’s bedroom and see him sleeping. Just to check: ‘O.K., he’s here. He’s in the house.’ ” When, in his early thirties, Goro started working closely with his father for the first time, on the Ghibli Museum, he felt that he “understood his creative processes so well precisely because he’d been such an absent father. When I was a child, I studied him. To learn more about him, I watched his movies obsessively. I read everything that was written about him. I studied his drawings.” With a rueful chuckle, he added, “I think that I am the No. 1 expert on Hayao Miyazaki.”

When I asked Goro if he’d ever talked with his father about what he’d learned about him, he laughed and said no, he couldn’t picture that happening. He was closer to his mother, he said, who would take him hiking and mountain climbing, and who taught him the names of trees, flowers, and birds. But Goro did remember that after his father finished a production the family would celebrate with an eel dinner at a restaurant. When he pestered his father for toys, Miyazaki had shown him how to whittle instead—an ability for which he was now grateful. It left him with the feeling that no matter where he was he could make something with his hands.

As driven as Miyazaki was, he did not achieve fame overnight. He was in his late thirties by the time he had his first directing credit—for a Japanese TV series, “Future Boy Conan,” as it’s called, awkwardly, in English. And it wasn’t until he wrote the manga “Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind,” and then received funding to make it into a movie, that he became widely known.

Toshio Suzuki met Miyazaki in 1978, when Suzuki was working as the editor of Animage, an animation magazine. He had been assigned to interview Miyazaki, but Miyazaki refused. “So I showed up at the studio, without phoning first, and Miyazaki ignored me,” Suzuki told me. “He said only one thing: ‘I’m busy. Go home.’ I brought over a chair and sat down next to him. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m not going home until you say something to me.’ I sat there till late at night, until he went home. The next day, I went back and sat down in that same place. On the third night, he finally spoke to me—to ask for advice. He asked about whether there was a specific term for this kind of car chase he was doing. I told him what the name was; we talked about other things, and after a while he consented to an interview. But then we tried to take a photo. He didn’t want a photo. Only from the back. So I got pissed. I ran the shot and I did a little caption for it: ‘A very rare photo of the back of Hayao Miyazaki’s head.’ That was my revenge. Starting from that day, we’ve been working together for twenty-five years, and I have seen him nearly every day.”

In 1985, Tokuma Shoten, the publishing company, which had released the manga of “Nausicäa,” opened an anime studio, Ghibli; Toshio Suzuki, Isao Takahata, and Hayao Miyazaki became its directors. The name was Miyazaki’s choice; ghibli is a word that Italian pilots once used to describe a wind blowing from the Sahara. To Miyazaki, the name conveyed a message, almost a threat—something like “Let’s blow a sensational wind through the Japanese animation world,” Suzuki recalled, in a speech years later. The studio would produce animation that, as Suzuki put it in his speech, “illustrates the joys and sorrows of life as they really are” and, as Miyazaki put it in the Ghibli Museum catalogue, shows “how complex the world is and how beautiful the world should be.”

Miyazaki threw himself into the project single-mindedly. “He would work from nine to four-thirty in the morning,” Suzuki said. “And he didn’t take holidays. He changed quite a bit when he turned fifty—he figured maybe he should take off a Sunday now and then. Now he tends to leave at midnight.” (Miyazaki told me, “I don’t take long vacations. I don’t have the time. My idea of a vacation is a nap.”)

Studio Ghibli’s first film was “Castle in the Sky” (1986), a fable featuring a gutsy girl from another planet, a gallant boy from a Welsh mining village, a magical crystal pendant, and a variety of flying machines that look like futuristic imaginings from the nineteenth century. Neither it nor “Totoro” nor “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988)—an almost unbearably sad film, directed by Takahata, about two Japanese children fleeing fire-bombing raids in the last days of the Second World War—did well at the box office, though they received great reviews. But the “Totoro” characters had staying power: two years after the film was released, Ghibli licensed the merchandising of Totoro stuffed animals, and, when sales took off, the studio was able to cover any deficit in its production costs. And in 1989 the studio had its first hit, “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” (The apprentice witch, modelled on Suzuki’s teen-age daughter, leaves her family for a time to live in a coastal city in Miyazaki’s Europe, starting her own business delivering parcels by broomstick.) “Kiki” was seen by 2.6 million people, becoming the most popular domestic movie in Japan that year.

At that point, Miyazaki floated the idea of disbanding the studio. “He felt that after directing three films, made with the same group of people, the human relationships had become too tangled,” Suzuki recalled. He eventually convinced Miyazaki that closing shop would be a mistake. (Suzuki is perhaps one of the few people, if not the only person, who can talk Miyazaki into anything. “He knows how to handle Miyazaki,” Takahata said. “He knows that it’s like dealing with a child: when you want something, you say the opposite, because you know he’ll say no to your suggestion.”)

The studio became successful to the point that the staff was working on two projects at once. Miyazaki, Suzuki recalled in his speech, “came up with a proposition: Let’s build a new studio!” He went on, “It was the Miyazaki way: when facing a problem, try to find a breakthrough by coming up with a much bigger problem.”

The day I spoke with Suzuki, he was wearing black jeans and a T-shirt, and was chain-smoking. “Young people, unknown people with aspirations—they are very pure, honest, and so on,” he said. “Miyazaki saw that I was not that type, and he liked that.” Suzuki is the public face of Ghibli. He, not Miyazaki, attended the Venice Film Festival, in September, where “Howl’s Moving Castle” won an award for technical achievement. He’s funny and shrewd, and he fills in for the interview-shy Miyazaki with flair. Suzuki told me, “Just recently, Miyazaki-san came into my room at night and we had a talk—just the two of us. He said, with a very serious look, ‘What are we going to do about Studio Ghibli? There aren’t many young talents out there.’ He said, ‘I think I can do this another ten years.’ I said ‘You can? Another ten years?’ Japanese fans tell him, ‘Please keep making animation.’ I’m the only person in Japan who hopes he will retire soon.”

Takahata and Miyazaki, who worked together so closely for years, have lately moved in different directions. Takahata is more interested in literary and film theory, more cerebral and less enamored of magic. His films are not for children, and “Grave of the Fireflies” could easily have been a live-action film. Takahata is sixty-nine, but he has a formidable head of dark hair and a handsome, unwrinkled face. “With Miyazaki, you have to totally believe in the world of the film,” Takahata told me. “He is demanding that the audience enter the world he has created completely. The audience is being asked to surrender.” He paused. “I want the audience to have a little distance. My relationship with him is limited now. We are friends but we don’t have a direct working relationship.”

For many viewers, of course, surrendering to Miyazaki is a pleasure. Weeks after I saw “Spirited Away,” I was still thinking of the scene in which Chihiro takes a train trip, in the company of No Face, to seek out a witch who may help her save her friend. The sequence is both emotionally precise and fantastical. It’s like every solitary journey you’ve ever taken, when you felt lonely and a little exalted, but it is also deeply strange, for the train glides, stately and surreal, over a translucent blue sea, while the sky slowly ripples through the possibilities of a sunset, from the pink of crushed petals to a soft, forgiving black.

On the wall of one of the Studio Ghibli buildings is a kind of joke about Miyazaki’s fears of invasion: two aluminum poles and two red hard hats on pegs. The staff was free to borrow them, Miyazaki explained to his colleagues, in order to repel unwanted visitors. But during my visit to the studio Steve Alpert, an American who heads Ghibli’s overseas division, showed me around, and in an upstairs room I saw Miyazaki hanging out with a couple of animators. He had shown the completed “Howl’s Moving Castle” to his wife and the Ghibli staff that day. He was in a relaxed mood, and when I started asking him questions, through a translator, he started answering.

Miyazaki’s hair was parted on the side, and a luxuriant hank of it fell over one eye periodically, Veronica Lake style. He wore big oblong glasses, gray slacks, a light-blue short-sleeved shirt, and straw-soled sandals with white socks. At first glance, he seemed full of suppressed amusement—even jolly.

Today, Miyazaki announced cheerfully, marked the last time that he would watch “Howl’s Moving Castle.” “I never watch my films after they’ve left the studio, because I’ve lived it and I know exactly where I’ve made mistakes,” he said. “I’d have to sort of cringe and hide, just close my eyes. ‘Oh, right, I remember that mistake, and that one.’ You don’t have to go through that torment over and over.” The remark was punctuated with a giddy, slightly maniacal laugh—more of a giggle, really. In any case, he said, he was already planning his next project: a short film for the museum. “I have several I have to make. What can I do? I have to keep feeding my staff,” he said, gesturing toward a group that had gathered around us. “Look at all the mouths I’ve got to feed here.”

I asked him what had attracted him to “Howl’s Moving Castle.” He said, “Sophie, the girl, is given a spell and transformed into an old woman. It would be a lie to say that turning young again would mean living happily ever after. I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to make it seem like turning old was such a bad thing—the idea was that maybe she’ll have learned something by being old for a while, and, when she actually is old, make a better grandma. Anyway, as Sophie gets older, she gets more pep. And she says what’s on her mind. She is transformed from a shy, mousy little girl into a blunt, honest woman. It’s not a motif you see often, and, especially with an old woman taking up the whole screen, it’s a big theatrical risk. But it’s a delusion that being young means you’re happy.”

Miyazaki puffed on a cigarette. “Some people may say this girl is a lot like Chihiro. Maybe. But I don’t fear that. I think I’d lose a lot more by trying to avoid repeating myself than by just repeating myself. Some people are always trying radically new material. I know what I want, and I’ll continue with it.” He went on, “I don’t have much patience for calculating and intellectualizing anymore. It has to do with the times. Nobody knows everything. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So my conclusion is, don’t try to be too smart and wise. Why does anybody feel the way they do? Why is somebody depressed? Or angry? Even if you have a therapist, you’re never going to figure it out. You’re not going to solve it. Besides, every trauma is an important part of you.”

Miyazaki cradled the back of his head with his hand. “I’ve done things in this movie I wouldn’t have done ten years ago,” he said. “It has a big climax in the middle, and it ends with a resolution. It’s old-fashioned storytelling. Romantic.” Indeed, “Howl’s Moving Castle” has the first kiss ever in a Miyazaki film, and contains more of an overt love story. “Howl’s” doesn’t have the elegiac beauty of certain sequences in “Spirited Away,” nor does it have the emotional delicacy of “Totoro.” (The Howl character, a vain, reclusive boy wizard who dresses in capes and epauletted jackets, reminded me somehow of Michael Jackson.) But it does have the director’s commanding sense of magic, along with a windy, wildflower-strewn Alpine landscape, and an amusingly cranky fire demon named Calcifer. And the living, breathing, clanking castle is one of Miyazaki’s most marvellous designs: it looks like a giant teakettle bristling with turrets and balconies, and shifts about in its metal skin like a rhino, striding across the countryside on, yes, chicken feet.

The afternoon was warm, and outside the window cicadas were making a racket. Miyazaki continued to look twinkly, but nonetheless he began airing a briskly dire view of the world. “I’m not jealous of young people,” he said. “They’re not really free.” I asked him what he meant. “They’re raised on virtual reality. And it’s not like it’s any better in the countryside. You go to the country and kids spend more time staring at DVDs than kids do in the city. I have a place in the mountains, and a friend of mine runs a small junior high school nearby. Out of twenty-seven pupils, he told me, nine do their schoolwork from home! They’re too afraid to leave their homes.” He went on, “The best thing would be for virtual reality just to disappear. I realize that with our animation we are creating virtual things, too. I keep telling my crew, ‘Don’t watch animation! You’re surrounded by enough virtual things already.’ ”

We walked out to the rooftop garden that Goro had designed as a place where staff could rest and recharge. The studio’s four small buildings are lovely, and are complete with Miyazakian refinements. In some workspaces where he thought there wasn’t enough light or hint of the outside, he had trompe-l’oeil windows painted that depict meadows beneath cerulean skies. The building containing his office—which he refers to as “the pig’s house”—looks like an elaborate Swiss châlet, with a steep narrow stairway made of laminated blocks of golden pine, and a flying bridge with small doorways on either side. Once, Alpert told me, when Miyazaki looked out and noticed a procession of preschoolers walking by on the street, he invited them in, “and just gave them free rein and they ran up and down the stairs and onto the bridge, screaming and laughing.”

From the garden, we could hear taiko drums thumping out a dance for a neighborhood festival, and see a flamboyant sunset over the old pine trees that remain in this neighborhood, unlike in so many others around Tokyo. With surprising enthusiasm, Miyazaki brought up the subject of environmental apocalypse. “Our population could just suddenly dip and disappear!” he said, flourishing his cigarette in the air. “I talked to an expert on this recently, and I said, ‘Tell me the truth.’ He said with mass consumption continuing as it is we will have less than fifty years. Then it will all be like Venice. I think maybe less, more like forty. I’m hoping I’ll live another thirty years. I want to see the sea rise over Tokyo and the NTV tower become an island. I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high-rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire—all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.”

He said that he’d visited the office tower of NTV, a Japanese television network, the day before: “I climbed two hundred and six metres up, to where the red lights are to warn the planes. You could see the whole city. And I thought, This place is haunted, doomed. All those buildings. All those cubicles.”

Suzuki joined us, and Takahata sat down without greeting anyone, delicately removing an enormous black ant from his pants leg. He said that he’d been reading a French novel in which ants are highly intelligent and can read. Somebody mentioned E. O. Wilson’s work on insects and their elaborate forms of communication.

“How are your frogs, by the way?” Suzuki asked Miyazaki, who explained that he kept them in a pond at home.

“I’m trying to keep track of how many tadpoles I have, but how can I? I can’t write numbers on their backs.”

The three men talked for a while about frogs and dragonflies and cicadas, and how the Japanese grasshopper population is declining because of overdevelopment. All of them warmed to the topic. “There’s an abandoned house near mine, and I want to buy it and keep it wild,” Miyazaki said. “Let all the wild grasses grow over it. It’s amazing how much they grow—their living energy. I wouldn’t cut the grass at all, but then there’s always the old ladies who come along with their hedge trimmers and scold you. We’ll have to wait for that generation to die off. Until then, we’ll never see grass like I want to see grass.”

He was not a gardener himself, he said. “Gardening is my wife’s territory. But, when she gardens, it’s like a holocaust. You see a bug? It’s evil. You have to exterminate it. Even the weeds—poor plants—she just yanks them out.” He smiled. “It’s not ecological at all. It’s fascism.” Japan should start a new form of agriculture, he proclaimed, then admitted, “I can’t do it. I’m not the farmer type, so I just complain.”

I noted that he had donated the “Totoro” licensing rights to a nature trust to help buy up some nearby woodlands and preserve them from development. “Oh, it’s not much of a wood, but we try to do something,” he said. Takahata spoke up: “If you add up all the land you’ve saved, it’s vast.” Miyazaki shrugged.

I asked him if he’d ever want to live anywhere else—he seemed so bitter about Japan’s environmental depredations. “No,” he said. “Japan is fine—because they speak Japanese. I like Ireland, though, the countryside there. Dublin has too many yuppies, computer types, but I like the countryside, because it’s poorer than England.” He mentioned liking Potsdam, in Germany, and the decrepit castle at Sans Souci. “Sometimes I encounter places that I feel as though I saw as a boy. A certain light in an old kind of town. Like in Tarkovsky’s films, that feeling is always there. I felt that way about a town in Estonia that I visited.” Miyazaki added that he didn’t really find travel relaxing; he found walking relaxing—that was the way human beings were meant to relax, and he expressed the wish that he “could walk back and forth to work every day, except that it would take two and a half hours each way,” and then he wouldn’t have enough time to work.

This remark suddenly seemed to remind him of all the work that he had to do. Miyazaki turned to leave, and Suzuki and Takahata, along with other staff members, began drifting away.

On the train ride back to downtown Tokyo, I thought about how kind and humane Miyazaki’s films typically are, and how harsh he had often sounded in person. I decided to admire this dichotomy as an example of what the social critic Antonio Gramsci called “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” An interviewer once remarked to Miyazaki that his movies expressed “hope and a belief in the goodness of man.” Miyazaki replied that he was, in fact, a pessimist. He then added, “I don’t want to transfer my pessimism onto children. I keep it at bay. I don’t believe that adults should impose their vision of the world on children. Children are very much capable of forming their own visions.” ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Little treats galore: a holiday gift guide .

What happened when the Hallmark Channel “ leaned into Christmas .”

An objectively objectionable grammatical pet peeve .

Two teens went to prison for murder. Decades later, a juror learned she got it wrong .

How Maria Callas lost her voice .

Personal History: Thanksgiving in Mongolia .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

Members Login

Hayao Miyazaki

One of Japan’s most distinctive filmmakers, Hayao Miyazaki has earned acclaim and recognition for his anime features since his debut in 1979 with The Castle of Cagliostro .  In 1985 he co-founded Studio Ghibli, which has since become a major name in the worlds of animation and international filmmaking. His subsequent films included Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo (2008) and The Wind Rises (2013). His 2001 feature, Spirited Away , won an Academy Award for Animated Feature. In 2014, he was chosen to receive an Honorary Award at the Academy’s Governors Awards.

More Collection Highlights

Stevens family collection, richard donner, the french connection, flfa posters, the silence of the lambs, mary pickford, miracle on 34th street.

• Anime Search
• Seasonal Anime
• Recommendations
• 2024 Challenge
• Fantasy Anime League
• Manga Search
• Manga Store
• Interest Stacks
• Featured Articles
• Episode Videos
• Anime Trailers
• Advertising
• MAL Supporter

Miyazaki, Hayao

Members Score Most Recent Start Date Title

See More Recent News

Hayao Miyazaki Returns to Make a New Feature Length Movie

Toshio Suzuki has announced at an event in the US on Thursday that a new feature length movie by Hayao Miyazaki is in production. Hayao announced that he would retir... read more

Feb 24, 2017 6:27 AM by tsubasalover | Discuss (70 comments)

News Briefs for Aug 25 - 31

Here is a collection of news briefs for the last week in anime/manga news. These briefs include announcements that would not normally receive their own news thread. ... read more

Sep 1, 2014 11:22 AM by Snow | Discuss (23 comments)

See More Recent Featured Articles

Going Green: Top 10 Anime with Environmental Themes

by MisterD98

67,965 views

Attention All Artists! Hayao Miyazaki Seeking Artists for Final Film

by Unnamedhero

15,088 views

More Top Anime

• 1 Sousou no Frieren
• 2 One Piece Fan Letter
• 3 Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
• 4 Steins;Gate
• 5 Shingeki no Kyojin Season 3 Part 2

More Top Airing Anime

• 1 Bleach: Sennen Kessen-hen - Soukoku-tan
• 2 Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu 3rd Season
• 3 One Piece
• 5 Natsume Yuujinchou Shichi

More Most Popular Characters

• 1 Lamperouge, Lelouch
• 3 Monkey D., Luffy
• 4 Lawliet, L
• 5 Roronoa, Zoro

Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki (Miyazaki Hayao, born January 5, 1941) is a Japanese manga artist and prominent film director and animator of many popular anime feature films. Through a career that has spanned nearly five decades, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a maker of animated feature films and, along with Isao Takahata, co-founded Studio Ghibli, an animation studio and production company. The success of Miyazaki's films has invited comparisons with American animator Walt Disney, British animator Nick Park as well as Robert Zemeckis, who pioneered Motion Capture animation, and he has been named one of the most influential people by Time Magazine.

Miyazaki began his career at Toei Animation as an in-between artist for Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon where he pitched his own ideas that eventually became the movie's ending. He continued to work in various roles in the animation industry over the decade until he was able to direct his first feature film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro which was published in 1979. After the success of his next film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, he co-founded Studio Ghibli where he continued to produce many feature films until Princess Mononoke whereafter he temporarily retired. While Miyazaki's films have long enjoyed both commercial and critical success in Japan, he remained largely unknown to the West until Miramax released his 1997 film, Princess Mononoke. Princess Mononoke was the highest-grossing film in Japan—until it was eclipsed by another 1997 film, Titanic—and the first animated film to win Picture of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards. Miyazaki returned to animation with Spirited Away. The film topped Titanic's sales at the Japanese box office, also won Picture of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards and was the first anime film to win an American Academy Award.

Miyazaki's films often incorporate recurrent themes, such as humanity's relationship to nature and technology, and the difficulty of maintaining a pacifist ethic. Reflecting Miyazaki's feminism, the protagonists of his films are often strong, independent girls or young women. Miyazaki is a vocal critic of capitalism and globalization.[3] While two of his films, The Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky, involve traditional villains, his other films such as Nausicaa or Princess Mononoke present morally ambiguous antagonists with redeeming qualities.

Related articles

Movies | 12 11 2024

Movies | 28 08 2024

Movies | 03 07 2024

Movies | 17 04 2024

Movies | 18 01 2024

Movies | 29 12 2023

Movies | 11 12 2023

Movies | 08 12 2023

• Login / Sign Up
• Entertainment

Watch the 4-hour documentary that unravels Hayao Miyazaki’s obsessions

10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki is an intimate look at Miyazaki’s process, and it’s free online

If you buy something from a Polygon link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

by Karen Han

May 25-30 is Studio Ghibli Week at Polygon. To celebrate the arrival of the Japanese animation house’s library on digital and streaming services , we’re surveying the studio’s history, impact, and biggest themes. Follow along via our Ghibli Week page .

The TV documentary 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki , which originally aired on NHK in Japan, is now available to watch for free on NHK’s website . Split into four segments that each run just under an hour, the documentary series is directed by Kaku Arakawa, who gained access to the director and Studio Ghibli under the condition that only one person (Arakawa himself) would be allowed to film and conduct interviews.

The result is an intimate look at the director’s process and history, spanning the production of Tales from Earthsea , Ponyo , From Up on Poppy Hill , and The Wind Rises . Each episode focuses on a different aspect of Miyazaki’s life, some broad (how he works) and some more specific (the production of The Wind Rises ). Together, they add up to a portrait of a filmmaker that captures not only his genius, but also his pricklier side.

Here are the most striking things we learned from watching the documentary.

Episode 1: “Ponyo Is Here”

The first episode of the documentary is the most informative about Miyazaki’s general process and day-to-day activities as he begins work on Ponyo . He’s introduced driving to his private studio in his Citroen 2CV, and Arakawa explains that he arrives at 10 a.m. every day, opening up every room and saying, “Good morning” to the empty rooms. (Miyazaki, when prompted, says he’s greeting “the residents.”) He also puts a bench outside the studio every day as a “trap” for people-watching, luring people to come sit and be observed.

Rather than starting with a screenplay, Miyazaki starts with a single image, then builds an image board and storyboards as he goes, to create “the ultimate entertaining picture.” As he’s gotten older, his daily page output has lessened and he’s been forced to use softer lead pencils, but his work ethic is, if anything, only getting stronger. Toward the end of preparing for the film, he goes into isolation, and grows noticeably irritated at being followed around by a camera. “I want to stay grumpy,” he says. “That’s who I am.”

An interview with producer and Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki at the end of the episode also reveals a key point. “Nothing Miyazaki made could ever top Totoro,” Suzuki says, referring to the now-iconic monster. “This became an obsession. Totoro became Miyazaki’s enemy.”

Episode 2: “Drawing What’s Real”

The second episode delves into the work that occurs once Studio Ghibli opens and animators begin work on the film. Five seconds of footage take a week to complete, given how time-consuming hand-drawn animation is, and if an animator’s work doesn’t meet with Miyazaki’s approval, he redraws it himself.

Arakawa uses the story of Ponyo to start revealing a little about Miyazaki’s personal life, noting that his mother fell ill when he was young, and became unable to really interact with her children. The character of Toki is based on his mother, as are the sick mother Yasuku in My Neighbor Totoro , and the fierce sky-pirate Dola in Castle in the Sky . Arakawa also describes Miyazaki’s childhood health problems, which caused a doctor to predict he wouldn’t live past 10 years old, and made him feel like an outcast until he discovered his talent for drawing and animation.

As the film details Miyazaki’s ascendance in the world of animation, it also reveals an initial idea for Princess Mononoke which, far from being the story we know now, was about a big mountain cat that falls in love with a human princess.

This episode also shows Miyazaki to be a fan of five-toe socks, as he’s seen wearing them (here as well as in other episodes) with his sandals.

Episode 3: “Go Ahead — Threaten Me”

The title of the third episode comes from Miyazaki’s reaction after seeing his son Gorō’s second feature, From Up on Poppy Hill . As he walks after the screening, he tells Arakawa, “Go ahead, threaten me” in response to being asked what he thought of it. The words are a message to Gorō, acknowledging that his work might finally be on par with his father’s.

The whole episode focuses on the relationship between Miyazaki and his son, which, in the brief instances in which they’re seen interacting in the first two episodes, seems just as fraught as past reporting and rumors have suggested. During a screening of Gorō’s Tales from Earthsea in the first episode, Miyazaki walks out to take a smoke break, saying, “You shouldn’t make a picture based on your emotions.”

Miyazaki is painted as a mostly absent father due to the demands of his animation work. He seems cognizant of that — as he reflects on how little he was home while Goro was growing up, he says, “I owe that little boy an apology.” But he’s also brusque in how he deals with Gorō. Gorō hides storyboards from him to prevent him from commenting on them and changing them, and Miyazaki interacts with everybody but Gorō when he visits the studio.

Goro initially went into consulting for construction as a way of escaping his father’s shadow, but ended up being drawn back into animation when Suzuki asked him to oversee construction for the Ghibli Museum. After that, Suzuki suggested Gorō direct Tales from Earthsea , which he did in spite of his father’s objections. Besides walking out of the screening, Miyazaki is also seen saying that watching Tales from Earthsea feels like proof that Goro hasn’t yet grown up, and, later, saying that maybe Goro ought to give up on directing. Miyazaki’s reaction to From Up on Poppy Hill seems to be favorable, however, despite its strong wording.

Episode 4: “No Cheap Excuses”

The fourth episode, in which Miyazaki gets caught up in the production of The Wind Rises , mostly focuses on the struggle of making the film, which deals with war, and Miyazaki’s legacy. At the beginning of the episode, Suzuki expresses his reservations about Ponyo , saying the movie feels a bit “been there, done that,” and hoping Miyazaki isn’t running out of steam. Miyazaki also feels uncertainty about what to work on next, countering his wife’s suggestion to make “something like Totoro ” with, “But we already made Totoro .”

The idea to make The Wind Rises is Suzuki’s, as he suggests Miyazaki should turn his manga about aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi into a movie. The problem there is to ensure that the movie doesn’t glorify war, and capture just why Horikoshi wanted to make planes, all while Japan undergoes a crisis due to a major earthquake.

One of the funnier parts of the episode involves casting Horikoshi’s voice — at a meeting, Hideaki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion , is suggested, and he’s soon brought in, tested, and cast for the part. Miyazaki spends the following time walking through Studio Ghibli, excitedly informing everyone of the decision.

In spite of the trepidation with which production on The Wind Rises begins, the process ultimately ends happily. At the end of the first screening, Miyazaki says, “For the first time, I cried watching a movie I made.” As the documentary draws to a close, Miyazaki notes that he’s feeling a distance from film, but balances any doubt he feels by saying, “I think I’ll gradually return to my former self,” before seeing Arakawa out of the studio. He’ll be making movies again soon enough.

10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki is streaming on NHK’s website .

The Studio Ghibli Blu-ray collection

The latest available Studio Ghibli Blu-ray releases that will never disappear from streaming

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy .

More in Polygon’s Studio Ghibli movie guide

Most Popular

• Oh boy, the new Snow White trailer…
• The best music biopic of the year is now on Netflix and has all the energy of a real concert film
• Here is why Fortnite’s ‘Ready Up’ button disappeared
• Top 10 PlayStations, ranked
• Wait, how has It Takes Two sold 20 million copies?

Patch Notes

The best of Polygon in your inbox, every Friday.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Animation

The Latest ⚡️

Hayao Miyazaki

• Overview ↓
• Filmography ↓
• Awards ↓

Biography by Wikipedia

Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, screenwriter, author, and manga artist. A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker of animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the animation business.

Movie Highlights

Additional Information

All subgenres.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell

No artist has explored the contradictions of humanity as sympathetically and critically as the Japanese animation legend. Now, at 80, he’s coming out of retirement with another movie.

By Ligaya Mishan

Listen to This Article

THE SCREEN IS black, and then comes the first frame: Hayao Miyazaki, the greatest animated filmmaker since the advent of the form in the early 20th century and one of the greatest filmmakers of any genre, is seated in front of a cast-iron stove with a pipe running up toward the ceiling, flanked by windows propped half open. Sun burns through the branches of the trees outside. Three little apples perch on a red brick ledge behind the stove. He wears an off-white apron whose narrow strap hooks around the neck and attaches with a single button on the left side — the same style of apron he has worn for years as a work and public uniform, a reminder that he is at once artist and artisan, ever on guard against daubs of paint — over a crisp white collared shirt, his white mustache and beard neat and trim, and his white hair blurring into a near halo as he gazes calmly at me through owlish black glasses, across the 6,700 miles from Tokyo to New York.

I have one hour to ask questions. It is a rare gift, as Miyazaki has long preferred not to speak to the press except when absolutely necessary (which is to say, when he’s prodded into promoting a film), and has not granted an interview to an English-language outlet since 2014. Our conversation has been brokered by the newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which mounted the first North American retrospective of his work in September, with Studio Ghibli’s cautious assent; Jessica Niebel, an exhibitions curator, cites him as an exemplar of an auteur who “has managed to stay true to himself” while making movies that are “approachable to people everywhere.” I know I am lucky to have this time, and yet it feels wrong to meet Miyazaki this way, at a distance (due to Covid-19 travel restrictions) and through a computer, a machine he has so famously shunned.

For, in an age of ever-advancing technology, his animated films are radical in their repudiation of it. From “ My Neighbor Totoro ” (1988), with its vision of gentle friendship between two children and an enormous growling forest creature whom only they can see, to the ecological epic “ Princess Mononoke ” (1997), whose title character, a human raised by wolves, first appears sucking blood out of a wound in her wolf mother’s side (the hero, an exiled prince, takes one look at her blood-smeared face and falls in love), to the phantasmagorical fable “ Spirited Away ” (2001), in which a timid girl must learn pluck and save her foolish parents (who’ve been transformed into pigs) by working at a bathhouse that caters to a raucous array of gods, Miyazaki renders the wildest reaches of imagination and the maddest swirls of motion — the stormy waves that turn into eel-like pursuers in “ Ponyo ” (2008), the houses rippling and bucking with the force of an earthquake in “ The Wind Rises ” (2013) — almost entirely by hand. And unlike Walt Disney, the only figure of comparable stature in animation, Miyazaki, who is now 80, has never retreated to the role of a corporate impresario, dictating from on high: At Studio Ghibli, the animation company he founded with the filmmaker Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki in 1985, he’s always worked in the trenches, as part of a team of around a hundred employees devoted just to production, including key animators and background, cleanup and in-between artists, whose desks he used to make the rounds of daily for decades. (His own desk is hardly bigger than theirs.) He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself. Only occasionally has he resorted to computer-generated imagery, and in some films not at all.

“I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil,” he tells me. (We speak through an interpreter, Yuriko Banno.) Japanese pencils are particularly good, he notes: The graphite is delicate and responsive — in the 2013 documentary “ The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness ,” directed by Mami Sunada, he mocks himself for having to rely on a soft 5B or even softer 6B as he gets older — and encased in sugi (Japanese cedar), although, he muses, “I don’t see that many quality wood trees left in Japan anymore.” He adds, “That’s a true story,” then laughs, leaning in to the screen, and I think of the ancient, moss-cloaked trees in “Princess Mononoke,” cut down to fuel Lady Eboshi’s ironworks, and of their counterparts in the Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine on the island of Yakushima in the south, which Miyazaki visited while location scouting for the film. The oldest cedar there, 83 feet tall and nearly 54 feet in circumference, is believed to be more than 2,600 years old, making it one of the oldest trees on earth. (The forest of the film does not exactly correspond to the ravine, Miyazaki has said: “Rather, it is a depiction of the forest that has existed within the hearts of Japanese from ancient times.”)

Miyazaki lives with his wife, Akemi, a former fellow animator — they met as colleagues at Toei Animation nearly 60 years ago on the movie “Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon,” and married in 1965; she stopped working to raise their two sons, at his request, and, he has said in the past, “hasn’t forgiven” him — in Tokorozawa, northwest of Tokyo, where the Totoro Fund (supported in part by donations from the Miyazakis) has purchased more than 10 wooded hectares, dense with oak and camphor trees, for conservation. But today he is speaking to me from the Tokyo suburb of Koganei, from a small building a short walk away from the headquarters of Studio Ghibli that he uses as a private atelier. He sometimes affectionately calls it Buta-ya, Japanese for “pig house.” (He is fond of pigs, and often sketches himself as one.) Out front he parks his cloud-gray Citroën 2CV, with a tiny nine-horsepower engine and a rollback roof that leaks when it rains (the model was discontinued in 1990); a wine-colored version of it appears in the careening cliffside chase scene in his directorial debut, “ Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro ” (1979). Every December, he puts cuddly stuffed goats, mementos of his work on the “Heidi: A Girl of the Alps” TV series in the ’70s, in the kitchen window to greet passing children. When the Academy Museum requested a goat to display in its exhibition, he demurred: The children would miss them.

Buta-ya was meant to be a retirement office, where Miyazaki could pursue personal projects. He built it in 1998, after announcing that he would make no more feature films, then returned to Studio Ghibli the next year with the story idea that would become “Spirited Away,” the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history until last fall’s “ Demon Slayer: Mugen Train ” (an extension of a popular manga franchise and part of a different strain of Japanese anime, focused on action and vengeance, with a video-game-like feel). “Spirited Away” won the 2002 Academy Award for best animated feature, the only film from outside the West to ever do so. In 2013, he said again that he was done with film, and that time, having directed 11 features in 34 years, he was taken seriously: Studio Ghibli shut down its production department.

Yet here he is now, making a new film. “Because I wanted to,” he says, and grins, like a grizzled thief come back for one last heist.

GORGEOUS, PROFOUND, BORDERLESS in possibility — yes, yes, but above all, Miyazaki’s films are thrilling . He is a master of suspense, whether sending a fugitive girl skittering down a rickety pipe that pops off the wall as she runs (“Spirited Away”), or swooping after a novice witch reeling on a broomstick because she’s forgotten how to fly and must quickly relearn so she can rescue her friend, a boy who’s dangling from a dirigible and about to crash into a clock tower (the 1989 “Kiki’s Delivery Service”). His visual style is at once commanding and intimate, a mix of fluid, loose lines and an accumulation of detail — in contrast to more mainstream anime’s labor-saving preference for caricature and clipped movement — that enables him to invoke the immediacy of life without being beholden to its precise contours. He deploys a palette of saturated colors, bright but never gaudy, standing out against cool grays and dun tones, and pays attention to quicksilver adjustments of light and shade, especially the shadows within shadows that give featheriness and depth to the night. He is equally expressive in close-up and panorama, and virtuosic in his open skies, creating clouds that are almost characters unto themselves, whether high-heaped loomers, broad swaths of rubble or voluptuous whorls like the heavy heads of flowers, stained by sunset or the deepening blues of day. (The Academy Museum’s retrospective includes a green-carpeted knoll where visitors may rest and gaze up at a video of passing clouds.)

And how easily Miyazaki slips from one register to the next, from hushed to clamorous, often in the same scene, as in the exquisitely timed comedy of towering Totoro, with his giant claws, standing beside two little girls at a bus stop in the dark. It’s raining; one girl offers him an umbrella, an instrument he has never encountered before. A toad stares at him from across the road, as if equally perplexed. We squint up at the trees to see a few particularly fat raindrops falling from a branch. They plonk down on the umbrella, loud, and Totoro startles. More drops come, a scattering of drumbeats, and his eyes widen. He heaves his body up in the air and lands with a boom, and all the drops caught in the trees come crashing down, his own personal storm. And then — because of course there’s more — the bus arrives, only it’s a scampering cat with headlight eyes and a door that opens in its side to whisk Totoro away.

But Miyazaki is a realist, too. Toward the end of his 2004 film, “ Howl’s Moving Castle ,” which is mostly devoted to magic — a girl is transformed by a witch into an elderly woman, a wizard shape-shifts into a dark man-bird, a castle uproots itself and clanks around on clawed feet — a great-bellied airship looms into view and starts dropping bombs on a cobblestone town. Black clouds and flames surge over houses; the sky hangs red. No war takes place in the source material, a 1986 novel by the British writer Diana Wynne Jones . This is Miyazaki’s memory.

He was born in 1941, the same year that Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, and he was 4 years old when American planes attacked the city of Utsunomiya, where his family had been evacuated from Tokyo. He recounts in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” how he saw a glow at the window and hid under a bridge, his legs in a ditch. With the incendiaries still falling, his father carried him up the riverbank and to a small truck so they could escape. As Miyazaki and his father settled into the vehicle’s bed, a woman with a child asked if they could come, too, but they were left behind. “We left them behind,” Miyazaki says. A month later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. More humiliations followed: the emperor’s renunciation of divinity, the dismantlement of the country’s armed forces and a formal abjuring of war, enshrined in the Constitution.

Although Miyazaki was too young to comprehend the magnitude of what was taking place, that time remains a cornerstone of his work, as it was and has been for many Japanese artists who came of age during the war or in its aftermath. The late antiwar painter Tatsuo Ikeda , who was born in 1928 and conscripted as a teenager to become a kamikaze pilot — the country’s defeat saved him — started out making portraits for American soldiers from snapshots of their girlfriends or wives, and went on to create eerie black-and-white tableaus that bristle with malformed animals and punishing machines. Haruki Murakami , born in 1949 in Kyoto, the former seat of the imperial court, writes novels of deadpan humor that surreally interrogate the legacy and persistence of Japanese nationalism.

And perhaps the most harrowing Japanese war film ever made is Studio Ghibli’s 1988 “ Grave of the Fireflies ,” adapted by Takahata from a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosaka about two children left homeless in the wake of an air raid. It bears the freight of Takahata’s own memories of fleeing a firebombing as a 9-year-old — he was born in 1935 — as his feet were burned by melting asphalt, and wandering without food for two days. “No one gave him anything, not even potato vines,” Miyazaki recalls in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.” (Astonishingly, in its first release, “Grave of the Fireflies” was paired with “My Neighbor Totoro” as a double bill: anguish and solace.)

Arguably, the rise of Japanese animation itself, in both its monster/superhero and more lyrical veins, was a direct response to the shock of defeat and anxiety over atomic fallout and the threat of genetic mutations. The monster Godzilla first appeared in a live-action 1954 film as a dinosaur, roused from the bottom of the ocean by an American hydrogen bomb test, who spews radiation over Tokyo in a visceral re-enactment of an air raid. (Miyazaki tells me that he remembers watching the movie and being reminded of American warplanes “dropping bombs from high above, out of reach.”) If Godzilla was fear and rage incarnate, Astro Boy — known in Japanese as the Mighty Atom, and introduced by the animation pioneer Osamu Tezuka in a 1951 manga, followed by an animated TV series starting in 1963 — sublimated anxiety into heroism: A boy robot whose body is powered by nuclear energy gets abandoned by his maker (giving him kinship with the war’s many orphans), but learns to use his abilities to fight for peace.

Miyazaki’s movies, with their warplanes and intrusions of Western décor and dress, keep circling back to the traumatic moment when Japan, which until the mid-19th century had kept itself closed off to the outside world, was forced to embrace the West and Western values. The devastated population complied in confused haste, as if to erase the shame of recent history and their own complicity in a war waged by a nationalist government out of a belief in Japan’s cultural superiority. (Some saw this as a capitulation to the West and a fatal loss of dignity; in 1970, the writer Yukio Mishima died by ritual suicide in protest, after shouting, “Long live the emperor!”) Niebel, of the Academy Museum, suggests that Japanese audiences are drawn to Miyazaki’s work because it’s essentially nostalgic. There’s a yearning, faintly mournful, for an older Japan, one free of both imperialistic hubris and Western materialism.

But part of his films’ greatness is that they can also be loved by viewers who never sense the dark current below. In “ Porco Rosso ” (1992), the hero may be an embittered war veteran, but he’s also, literally and delightfully, a pig flying a plane, and is spectacularly good at it.

MIYAZAKI’S FATHER WAS not a bystander in the war. He ran a munitions factory that produced wings for the military’s fearsomely acrobatic Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter planes, which in the last months of the war were converted for kamikaze missions. In a 1995 newspaper essay in The Asahi Shimbun, Miyazaki describes his father as something of a grifter, bribing officials to accept defective parts. After Japan’s surrender, when there were no more planes to furnish, his father used leftover duralumin, an aluminum alloy that had helped keep the Zero lightweight and dangerous, to make flimsy spoons, which he pawned off on impoverished customers desperate for household goods. Later, he briefly turned the factory into a dance hall, before bringing the family — Miyazaki is the second of four sons — back to Tokyo.

Although Miyazaki never set foot in his father’s factory, which was off limits as a military site, he was entranced by airplanes and the liberation of flight from an early age. (Ghibli is both the hot, dusty wind that sweeps through the Libyan Desert and the name of an airplane, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli, a World War II Italian reconnaissance bomber.) This obsession has manifested in almost every film, in humans who turn into flying creatures or simply walk on air; in fanciful machines like the flaptors in “ Castle in the Sky ” (1986), propelled by four translucent wings; and in reproductions of real-world aircraft, as in “Porco Rosso,” in which the hero’s wrecked seaplane, inspired by the 1920s-era Italian racer Macchi M.33, is rebuilt by an all-female crew to ready it for a climactic dogfight, and in “The Wind Rises,” which tells the (not entirely) true story of the designer of the Zero, Jiro Horikoshi , who in the film as in life opposed the war and whom Miyazaki portrays as reluctant to see the beautiful machines he’s created deployed as emissaries of death — a stand-in for Miyazaki’s father, or the man he might have been.

As Miyazaki grew older, he found fault with his father both for profiting off the war and for never expressing any shame or guilt. (He shares this troubled inheritance with the writers W.G. Sebald , born in 1944 in the Bavarian Alps, who had to grapple with his father’s past as a soldier in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and the Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano , born in the suburbs of Paris in 1945 not long after V-E Day, whose own father kept company with collaborators and profiteers.) And yet, Miyazaki wrote in 1995, “I am like him” — a man of contradictions: a filmmaker who condemns the proliferation of images even as he contributes to it; an artist who has devoted his career to children but was rarely home to take care of his own; an environmentalist who can’t bear to give up his cigarettes or wheezing car; a professed Luddite who revels in the mechanics of modern vehicles but tries “not to draw them in a fashion that further feeds an infatuation with power,” as he has written ; a pacifist who loves warplanes; a brooder with a dark view of how civilization has squandered the gifts of the planet, who nevertheless makes films that affirm the urgency of human life.

This embrace of contradictions may be why Miyazaki’s movies, although beloved in the West (if not as wildly successful as in Japan, where his last five films combined took in close to 100 billion yen in their first release, or around $873 million), in some ways thwart the Western mind. Absent are the dominating themes of monotheism — a fall from an original state of grace, followed by redemption — and a clear dichotomy of good and evil. “I’m not a god who decides on what is good and bad,” Miyazaki tells me. “We as humans make mistakes.” In his world, there are few outright villains or even truly bad characters, only characters who do bad things. Lady Eboshi wreaks havoc on the forest in “Princess Mononoke” but also gives sanctuary to brothel workers and those afflicted with leprosy. No-Face, the gliding black shroud who eats people in “Spirited Away,” turns out to be simply lonely and, when soothed, spits out his victims. Even the mutant stampeding army of trilobite-like behemoths from the toxic jungle in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” (1984), who kill the heroine by flinging her into the air and trampling her underfoot, end up restoring her to life with the touch of their golden antennae.

So Disney was never an influence. (Miyazaki has gone so far as to say, in a 1988 lecture, that he hated Disney’s movies and their easy sentimentality: “To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.”) Instead, Miyazaki looked to works like the French animator Paul Grimault’s “ The King and the Mockingbird ” (released in different forms in 1952 and 1980), in which a chimney sweep and a shepherdess flee from a vain and despised tyrant king through a cavernous 296-story castle while a coterie of animals mounts a revolution, and the Armenian animator Lev Atamanov’s “The Snow Queen” (1957), whose heroine self-effacingly sacrifices her shoes to a river to beg for help in finding her lost friend, and whose gleefully amoral, knife-wielding Robber Girl — who captures the heroine and steals her bonnet and muff, then is horrified and furious to find herself moved to tears by her victim’s tale of woe — is a forerunner to the wolf girl of “Princess Mononoke.”

Curiously, considering the limitations on women’s professional progress in Japan (which makes the country an outlier among developed nations), Miyazaki’s heroines outnumber his heroes. Within the world of anime, these characters are called shojo , girls of an in-between age, no longer quite children and not yet women; but where shojo were typically passive figures subject to romance narratives, Miyazaki’s girls display formidable know-how and independence. They take on jobs, organize households, fight battles and rescue boys from near death — all matter-of-factly, without ever trumpeting notions of girl power. Although some are princesses, they resist the trappings of fairy tales: Princess Mononoke doesn’t live in a palace. Chihiro, in “Spirited Away,” is awkward and lacks the big eyes that traditionally signify beauty and vulnerability in anime, while Sophie, the mousy milliner in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” spends most of the movie in the guise of a stooped old woman. Even when the spell is broken and her youth returns, her hair remains gray. It’s a reminder that something has been forever lost; that, even with the most powerful magic, there can be no reset, no starting over.

American animated films of today, by contrast, still tend to culminate in a happily ever after, or at least a vanquishing of foes. (“We have a desire for closure,” Niebel says.) Miyazaki offers something more nebulous and even unsettling. The resurrection in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” is a stark exception, for elsewhere in his oeuvre, death is not defeated, only at best delayed. Prince Ashitaka in “Princess Mononoke,” whose body has been progressively consumed by the dark stain of a curse, is never completely cured; a shadow remains on his arm, and he is separated from the girl he loves by a sense of duty — he to the humans of Iron Town, she to the wolves of the forest — although they promise to visit each other. Cruelty, too, is not so much punished as neutralized, as when the youthful-appearing Witch of the Waste in “Howl’s Moving Castle” is reinstated to her true age and revealed to be a doddering old lady, whom Sophie spoon-feeds without complaint, despite still suffering from the witch’s curse. Recovery may be possible, but not full restitution.

In a 1991 directorial memo for “Porco Rosso,” a farce that includes a preening American pilot eyeing a career as a Hollywood star and a snarling gang of sky pirates who prove helpless when confronted with a gaggle of schoolgirls, Miyazaki cautions, “We must treat every character respectfully. We must love their foolishness. ... One common mistake — the belief that to draw a cartoon is to draw someone sillier than oneself — must be avoided at all costs.” At the heart of the film is a hard-bitten bounty hunter who takes on the guise of a pig out of a sense of guilt at having survived World War I while his fellow pilots died. (Miyazaki describes the film to me as “a boy’s dream.”) The woman he loves but doesn’t believe he deserves laments this “curse,” but only he can free himself from it, by no longer condemning that part of himself.

“In the town that I live in, I have precious friends, but I also have people I detest,” Miyazaki tells me. “That is what human society is all about.” Even his friends are flawed, and not just them. He says, “It’s a mirror of who I am.”

IT IS TEMPTING to read Miyazaki’s protestations as simple humility, and to cast him, against his will, as a sort of secular saint. In many ways he fits the part: the benevolent neighborhood uncle who brings joy to children through his work, picks up trash from the river on his days off and, over the past two and a half decades, has made quiet pilgrimages to a sanitarium near his home for patients with leprosy who, for much of the 20th century, faced segregation by law in such facilities. One patient became a friend, and Miyazaki held his hand when he was dying.

But Takahata, Miyazaki’s mentor at Toei Animation in the ’60s and ’70s and, eventually, his greatest rival, dismisses this hagiography in the afterword to “ Starting Point ” (1996), a collection of Miyazaki’s early interviews, lectures and essays, writing, “Hayao Miyazaki is a man who struggles. ... He weeps, is playful, loves people, expects too much of their talents, howls at his broken dreams, becomes enraged.” The brilliant and notoriously perfectionist Takahata, who once took eight years to finish a film, died in 2018, but he still casts a shadow; Miyazaki spent 15 years working with Takahata before becoming a director himself, and even though his movies at Studio Ghibli consistently outperformed Takahata’s at the box office, he still craved his mentor’s approval. (Suzuki, in a 2014 memoir, insists that Takahata is the only viewer whom Miyazaki has ever wanted to please.)

To Takahata, Miyazaki’s contradictions made sense: Miyazaki is both an auteur, able to control and perfect every detail in his films, and an idealist endlessly disillusioned by the real world that eludes his grasp, and thus he rants, “yells destructively nihilistic things and blurts out statements that make him sound as though he aspires to become a dictator.” Miyazaki himself has always acknowledged his capacity for anger. To help his staff of animators understand how to draw the rampaging boar god turned demon in “Princess Mononoke,” whose flesh writhes with leechlike forms, he explained that he himself sometimes experienced a rage so strong it could not be contained inside his body.

Takahata recounts how in his early days at Toei Animation, Miyazaki would sometimes scare colleagues “by suddenly screaming, ‘Let this damned studio burn down!’” This wasn’t an entirely metaphorical statement, Takahata points out, given Tokyo’s history of earthquakes and fire, and Japan’s precarious position at a place where four tectonic plates creep and shift. If Miyazaki was speaking then with the impishness of the provocateur, later in his career his insistence on facing certain realities took a serious turn. J. Raúl Guzmán, an assistant curator at the Academy Museum, learned while helping to put together the retrospective that some Japanese viewers were shocked by Miyazaki’s depictions of a violent ocean storm in “Ponyo” and the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 in “The Wind Rises,” which his father lived through as a boy. The scenes were painful reminders of the country’s vulnerability — so painful that after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, which triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the broadcast network Nippon TV banned “Ponyo” from the airwaves for months.

In the wake of the meltdown, Studio Ghibli hung a banner from the roof with a statement rejecting nuclear power. But the country was divided on how to respond to the disaster. By exposing Japan’s weaknesses, Fukushima also heightened sentiments of neo-nationalism. There were calls to revise Japan’s postwar Constitution, which states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” and to allow the country to once again establish offensive military forces. Miyazaki has strongly and publicly voiced his opposition to remilitarization , earning a ferocious backlash from right-wing commentators online. But they’re shouting into the void: Miyazaki doesn’t even own a computer. He isn’t there.

AFTER THE WAR, Japan was shattered, occupied by the enemy, its cities in rubble. Food shortages left many hungry; American G.I.s handed out candy to children on the streets but, Miyazaki has written, he “was too ashamed” by Japan’s defeat to approach the soldiers. He was a shy, sickly boy — at one point, he nearly died — who took sanctuary in drawing, the one skill with which he could earn the attention and admiration of his peers. His mother was ill, too, suffering for years from spinal tuberculosis, and spent long stretches hospitalized like the mother in “My Neighbor Totoro” and the young wife in “The Wind Rises.” But the money his father had stockpiled from government wartime contracts helped keep the family in comfort, and in 1959 Miyazaki wound up at the prestigious Gakushuin University in Tokyo, which was originally established in the 19th century as a school for the nobility and whose students have included Emperor Naruhito and the singer and artist Yoko Ono .

It was a time of upheaval for Japan, with traditional agriculture giving way to heavy industrial development and the economy growing at breakneck speed. Studying Japanese industrial theory, Miyazaki began thinking of himself as a Marxist. He was drawn to the Anpo demonstrations of 1960 against Japan’s security treaty with the United States and authoritarian measures by the Japanese government, although he remained on the sidelines. He had started drawing manga in high school and, after graduating from university, took a job at Toei, where he quickly became the secretary general of the animators’ union, negotiating for better working conditions. Although he would eventually move away from Marxism — “no matter what class people are born into, idiots are still idiots and good people are still good,” he said in 1994 — he still thinks “there are many things we can learn from it,” he tells me; it’s just that no one philosophy in the world “would enable all of us to live happily.”

Miyazaki does not like to frame his work in explicitly ideological or moral terms. The mission of his films, he says, is to “comfort you — to fill in the gap that might be in your heart or your everyday life.” But his movies are haunted by his grief over the damage humans have done to the natural world. This may in part be a vestige of Shintoism, the indigenous faith of Japan, which holds that kami — at once specific supernatural beings and the divine essence within them — reside in all things. (Miyazaki follows no specific creed, but he has said that “sweeping the garden clean is already a religious act.”) As a teenager in the late ’50s, Miyazaki walked the streets of a Tokyo under constant construction, choked with dust. In 1964, when he was organizing workers at Toei, Japan hosted the Olympics and introduced the first bullet trains , which ate up the 320 miles between Tokyo and Osaka in four hours. By 1968, Japan was rich, second only to the United States in gross national product, and one of the most polluted countries on earth. (Thanks to the passage of strict environmental regulations, it is now one of the least.)

In “Spirited Away,” an oozing, fetid spirit comes to the bathhouse to be cleansed, and the intrepid heroine seizes what she thinks is a thorn in his side but turns out to be a bicycle. This unleashes a torrent of trash from his sludgy form: a refrigerator, a toilet, a traffic light. He is in fact an ancient river spirit, poisoned by pollution. Haku, the young apprentice, is a river spirit, too, but has forgotten his origins since his river was filled in and paved over to make way for apartments. Near the end, the film presents a fantasy of a world reclaimed by nature, as water fills a dry riverbed and spreads out into a vast sea — as if a visual riposte to the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico’s desolate urban piazzas — untroubled save for a train that skims across its surface.

There is a curious mix of fatalism and hope in Miyazaki’s work. The forest spirit in “Princess Mononoke” is murdered, despite the hero and heroine’s hardest efforts; yet the forest lives on. “For me, the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart,” Miyazaki said in a 1988 interview. “I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.” At the same time, Miyazaki resists romanticizing nature as purely benign, again rejecting a binary of good and evil. The boars, wolves and apes in “Princess Mononoke” can’t agree on how to protect the forest, and when the boar god is struck by a bullet, he succumbs to hatred and attempts to ravage Prince Ashitaka’s village. Even then, Ashitaka’s first instinct is not to kill him but to plead with him to leave. “When you meet something that is very strange that you haven’t met before, instead of being scared of it, try to connect with it,” Miyazaki tells me.

Where in the ’50s the still-raw memory of wartime destruction gave rise to monsters like Godzilla, specters of failed imperialism, Miyazaki’s work is notable in its insistence that we can learn to live alongside unfamiliar, even terrifying figures. Miyazaki once said that he wanted to make a version of “Beauty and the Beast,” only his interest was the beast. A trace of the fairy tale appears in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” in the desperate scene when the heroine follows bloody bird footprints down a dark hallway to find the wounded wizard in a feathered heap, unable to change back to his fully human self, trying not to die in his glittering lair embedded with the toys of the boy still buried inside him. Ashitaka, in “Princess Mononoke,” must wrestle a beast of his own: When he lets his arrows fly at the boar god turned demon, he gets too close and is infected by the creature’s rage. He, too, will begin to hate, the growing mark on his arm informs him. The only way to save himself is to master the true monster: within.

STUDIO GHIBLI MIGHT never have existed had Suzuki, now 73, not found a way to get past Miyazaki’s anger. The two men met in 1979, when, as the editor of an animation magazine, Suzuki showed up at Miyazaki’s workplace to procure an interview. (I speak with Suzuki in a separate online session, in which he is as loquacious as Miyazaki is evasive.) As Suzuki recalls, the filmmaker, in the throes of preproduction for his first feature, wanted nothing to do with him and accused him of “ripping off children” by making them buy his magazine. Rather than give up, Suzuki grabbed the desk next to Miyazaki’s and started working on the magazine there. The men sat hunched without speaking all day and into the night, until finally Miyazaki stood up to go home at 4 a.m. He told Suzuki he’d be back at 9 a.m., and so Suzuki returned then, too. Another day passed in silence. Only on the third day did Miyazaki start to talk.

Thus was born a friendship that would turn into an intimate creative collaboration: For his next film, “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” Miyazaki consulted with Suzuki on matters from the intricacy of the drawing style to the final scene, which Suzuki persuaded him to change (in the first version, the heroine simply dies, which Suzuki thought deprived the audience of catharsis). After that film’s release, Suzuki realized they would have to start their own studio because no one else would foot the bill for such labor-intensive productions. Although he has held different positions at Studio Ghibli over the decades (among them president and, currently, producer), his true role is as Miyazaki’s confidante and consigliere. They used to talk almost daily and now meet once a week — during my conversation with Miyazaki, he notes that Suzuki is sitting beside him, off-screen, urging him to finish his new film, which has thus far taken four years — and when they disagree on an idea, Suzuki, at least by his own account, tends to win.

Suzuki tells me that when Miyazaki came to him just over a year after retiring to say he wanted to make another film, “I was like, ‘Give me a break.’” He tried to talk him out of it, suggesting that Miyazaki’s best work was behind him. When his last film, “The Wind Rises,” came out in 2013, it did well at the box office but fell short of his previous four features , perhaps because it dealt directly with Japan’s culpability in the war, still an uncomfortable subject. But ultimately Suzuki caved in because, he says, “The whole purpose of Studio Ghibli is to make Miyazaki films.” What will happen, then, when Miyazaki does retire for good? His older son, Goro, 54, has made a few films for the studio, including the entirely computer-animated “Earwig and the Witch,” released in the United States last winter to mostly critical reviews that took less issue with the film itself than with the break in Ghibli tradition. (Miyazaki’s younger son, Keisuke, 51, is a printmaker.)

On the Covers

But Suzuki also points out, when discussing the differences between Japanese and American animation, that in the West, we always need to know how things end. At Ghibli, the last scene is often a mystery. Because each movie requires so much drawing, production must begin before Miyazaki is even halfway through his storyboards. When he was making “Spirited Away,” No-Face was at first just a spooky passer-by; only later did Miyazaki decide to promote him to a major character. Later, the director of animation begged him not to draw any new characters, so he came up with the idea of Yubaba, the coldhearted bathhouse operator, having a kindhearted identical twin, which turned out to be both a crucial plot point and a sounding of a favorite theme: that in all of us there is a duality and the potential for both good and bad.

Neither Miyazaki nor Suzuki will share much about the forthcoming film, beyond the fact that it is based on a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino . The story concerns a 15-year-old boy in Tokyo, small for his age and fond of mischief, whose father has recently died. In the English translation by Bruno Navasky, published in October, the boy gazes out at the city and is overwhelmed: “The watching self, the self being watched, and furthermore the self becoming conscious of all this, the self observing itself by itself, from afar, all those various selves overlapped in his heart, and suddenly he began to feel dizzy.” The actual content of the film could be anything — Suzuki has described it as “fantasy on a grand scale” — since Miyazaki doesn’t so much borrow stories as liberate them from their origins. (In the pseudobiographical “The Wind Rises,” he gives the real-life Jiro Horikoshi a fictional wife dying of tuberculosis.) All Suzuki will share is that he recognizes himself in one of the characters, who is not human.

It is time. Miyazaki rubs the top of his head and lights a cigarette, one of his signature king-size, charcoal-filtered Seven Stars. I am allowed one last question. “The title of your next film is ‘ How Do You Live? ,’” I say. “Will you give us the answer?”

The smile comes only after he speaks: “I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.”

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

An earlier version of this article, relying on information from Citroën, misstated the engine power of Hayao Miyazaki’s Citroën 2CV; it is nine horsepower, not two.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

Explore T Magazine

Freak City: From a masked artist to a Broadway pioneer, these are the one-of-a-kind creative forces  that are making New York more unique than ever before .

10 Flowers, 10 Places: Explore the countries and regions around the world where flowers play a vital role  — in cultural and religious traditions, the economy and daily life.

Our Favorite Travel Destinations: From France’s Cap Ferret to Japan’s Kagoshima, we looked back at some of 2024’s most enticing getaways .

A Hidden, Light-Filled Sanctuary: By gutting his Mexico City townhouse, the artist José León Cerrillo revealed endless possibilities .

What’s Wrong With White Bread?: After years of sourdough dominance, bakers are going back to basics .