Cartographer of Wonder
A maker of flying machines, ancient forests and brave children. His drawn worlds make room for wonder, work, and the difficult business of living together.
Animator, Director & Storyteller
Born in Tokyo in 1941, Hayao Miyazaki joined Toei Animation in 1963. Animation became a way to give imagined places weight: wind in grass, the effort of walking, the machinery of flight.
His films invite attention to small actions as readily as grand adventures. A meal, a journey or a pause can reveal the character of an entire world.
The Castle of Cagliostro was Miyazaki’s feature directing debut. Its pursuit through a castle’s hidden spaces offers an early route into his delight in movement and improbable machinery.
His drawn stories deserve their own shelf. The Nausicaä manga develops a much larger narrative than the film, while Shuna’s Journey follows a young prince searching for seeds that could sustain his people.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind brought ecological conflict and an unusually empathetic heroine to the screen in 1984. Studio Ghibli followed in 1985, co-founded with Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki.
Castle in the Sky and My Neighbor Totoro offer different scales of wonder: a civilisation in the clouds, and children discovering the strangeness of the countryside. These worlds emerge from the work of many artists, with music by Joe Hisaishi forming an enduring part of their character.
Princess Mononoke places a forest and an industrial settlement in a conflict whose participants have competing needs. Spirited Away follows a child into a bathhouse governed by work, appetite and contracts.
Miyazaki gives his protagonists more to do than defeat an enemy. They must pay attention, make choices, and learn how to act in a world they do not fully understand.
Miyazaki also wrote for other directors: Yoshifumi Kondō’s Whisper of the Heart, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Arrietty and Gorō Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill. Their credits reveal the collaborations within the studio.
Starting Point and Turning Point gather his essays and conversations about the work. The museum shorts open another path: small experiments in movement, sound and the scale of a child’s world.
The Wind Rises follows the dream of building beautiful aircraft into the history of war. The Boy and the Heron returns to childhood, grief and an unstable imagined world.
Follow these films as a conversation across a lifetime. The fantasy changes shape; the question of how to live remains.
