Hayao Miyazaki

Learning to draw a world

Miyazaki was born in Tokyo on 5 January 1941, the second of four sons. During the war his father, Katsuji, ran Miyazaki Airplane, a firm owned by Hayao’s uncle that made rudders for fighter planes, and the family moved out to Utsunomiya and Kanuma in Tochigi, where the factory stood. Hayao was four when the war ended. He remembers an air raid and seeing his town burn, and has said he “was humiliated that we lost the war.”

In a 2013 interview for Ghibli’s magazine Neppu he described his father as “a realist and a nihilist” who borrowed from the bank to invest in the factory in 1945, while friends warned him Japan would lose, and who saw it purely as business: “he regretted nothing.” After the surrender the works turned leftover duralumin into spoons, then became a dance hall, and the boy watched his parents dance to the blues. As a young man Miyazaki “often fought with him,” insisting his father shared responsibility for the war; the father would not take up the question. The beauty of aircraft and the use they are put to would become his subject.

His mother, Yoshiko, spent 1947 to 1955 bedridden with spinal tuberculosis, the first years in hospital, and the boys took on the housework. Late in 1958, a high-school student who should have been cramming for university exams, he saw Toei’s Hakujaden (The Legend of the White Snake), Japan’s first colour animated feature, in a cheap cinema. In a 1988 essay he confessed that he fell in love with its heroine, stumbled home through the snow and cried all night, ashamed of the fashionably cynical manga he was trying to write: “I could no longer deny the fact that I really wanted to affirm the world.” He had drawn planes and battleships, and had to teach himself people. At Gakushuin University he read politics and economics, joined the children’s literature research club, the nearest thing to a manga club, and graduated in 1963.

Union nights with Takahata

He joined Toei Doga, Toei Animation, in April 1963 as an in-betweener, the junior who draws the frames between an animator’s key poses, on 19,500 yen a month. By his own account the work bored him, and he doubted he would have stayed had the union not screened the Soviet feature The Snow Queen, which showed him “how much the movement of the pictures can sublimate to acting.” That year, at a bus stop in the twilight after rain, a young man approached him in conversation: Isao Takahata, 27 to Miyazaki’s 22. Miyazaki told the story at Takahata’s farewell in May 2018. By 1964 Miyazaki was secretary-general of the company union and Takahata its vice-chair, and the two would talk until dawn in the shack that served as the union office.

That solidarity became a film. On The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968), directed by Takahata with Yasuo Ōtsuka as animation director, Miyazaki volunteered far above his rank and was credited for scene design. In the eulogy he remembered Takahata as “an incredible persistent guy” whose new way of working baffled the staff: he negotiated limits on frames and days, broke them, and wrote the company a letter of apology each time. The film failed commercially. In 1965 Miyazaki married the animator Akemi Ōta, who worked on Horus; their sons were born in 1967 and 1969, the elder being Gorō.

In 1971 he followed Takahata out of Toei to A Production, where a Pippi Longstocking adaptation died when the rights could not be secured, and in 1973 to Zuiyō, for which he went to Switzerland that July to draw locations for Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974), working on scene design and the organisation of each scene. Placing the camera and moving bodies through real rooms and slopes, week after week, is where his sense of space was trained. In 1978 he directed his first series, Future Boy Conan, for Nippon Animation, handling 24 of its 26 episodes; only eight were finished when it began broadcasting.

A thief, a princess and a manga that outran its film

His first feature, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, opened on 15 December 1979 after about four months of production for Tokyo Movie Shinsha; Ōtsuka had brought him in to direct. Miyazaki softened Monkey Punch’s rogue toward a gallant rescuer, and the film’s pleasures are physical: a tiny Fiat clawing up a hillside, a leap across castle roofs, a final fight among the gears of a clock tower.

Toshio Suzuki, an editor at Tokuma Shoten’s magazine Animage, set out to get Miyazaki another film. His proposals, among them a Sengoku-period castle story and an adaptation of Richard Corben’s Rowlf, were turned down. So Miyazaki drew a story the company could publish first. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind ran in Animage from February 1982 to March 1994. In the same years he made Shuna’s Journey, a picture story about a prince searching for a grain to feed his people.

The film, released on 11 March 1984, was made at the contract studio Topcraft, with Takahata as producer and Joe Hisaishi composing, and financed by Tokuma with the advertising agency Hakuhodo. His mother died in July 1983, as work on it began. The film closes Nausicaä’s story in under two hours; the manga kept going for another decade and grew into a far larger war story. In the United States, New World Pictures cut the film by more than twenty minutes, renamed the heroine Zandra and released it in 1985 as Warriors of the Wind.

Beyond simple villains

Princess Mononoke (1997) was meant to be his last feature; he cited his eyesight and physical pain. Animation began in July 1995 before he had finished the storyboards, a first even for him. Every side gets reasons: the wolf-raised San, the forest gods, and Lady Eboshi’s ironworks, staffed by women bought out of brothels and by lepers she treats as people. The violence is not softened; arrows take off arms and heads.

Ghibli made a distribution deal with Disney in the mid-1990s, and Disney’s Miramax took Mononoke in the United States. Steve Alpert, Ghibli’s international executive, wrote in his 2020 memoir that Harvey Weinstein wanted it cut from 135 minutes to 90 and, told that Miyazaki would not agree, screamed that Alpert would “NEVER WORK IN THIS FUCKING INDUSTRY AGAIN!” The story that Miyazaki posted Weinstein a samurai sword with the note “No cuts” is half right. Asked by the Guardian in 2005, he laughed: “Actually, my producer did that,” meaning Suzuki. He had gone to New York himself and been “bombarded with this aggressive attack, all these demands for cuts.” Then: “I defeated him.” The film opened in America in 1999 uncut.

In 1995 he had written and storyboarded Whisper of the Heart for the animator Yoshifumi Kondō to direct, and made On Your Mark, a wordless music film for the duo Chage and Aska. On 14 January 1998 Miyazaki left Ghibli to retire. Kondō died on 21 January, and Miyazaki came back to direct.

Spirited Away (2001) shows the method plainly. “I don’t have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film,” he told a Paris audience that December. “… So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter… It’s a dangerous way to make an animation film,” and “everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it.” He had planned about 1,200 shots; the film needed 1,415. The scene he called the real end, Chihiro riding the train alone with No-Face, shows no mountains or forest through the windows, because, he said, nobody remembers the landscape on their first train ride alone. He had already flooded the plain with rain without knowing why: “How lucky that I made this an ocean.” The stinking river spirit came from the clean-up of a river near his country house, where a bicycle was so clogged with filth it could barely be dragged out.

Chihiro was tested against a friend’s ten-year-old daughter: for every task, he asked whether that girl could do it. The film won the Golden Bear in Berlin and, in March 2003, the Academy Award for animated feature. He stayed home. In 2009, as widely reported from a Los Angeles Times interview, he said he had not wanted “to visit a country that was bombing Iraq.”

Stories beyond his own features

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), from Diana Wynne Jones’s novel, took its war from his fury at the invasion of Iraq: a wizard turns monstrous flying over other people’s battles. Supervising Hiroyuki Morita on The Cat Returns (2002), he admitted that letting another director do things differently was “a true test of patience.”

His son tested it harder. Suzuki chose Gorō Miyazaki, who had never made a film, to direct Tales from Earthsea (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin had been assured the project would remain subject to the elder Miyazaki’s approval; she soon realised he was taking no part, and found the result violent and incoherent in places. Miyazaki opposed his son’s appointment. At a screening filmed for the documentary How Ponyo Was Born he walked out after an hour for a cigarette, then said: “I saw my own child. He hasn’t become an adult. That’s all.” A gentler message reached Gorō later, which he posted on his blog: “It was made honestly, so it was good.” Father and son later worked together on From Up on Poppy Hill (2011), Miyazaki co-writing with Keiko Niwa.

On Ponyo (2008) he insisted on drawing the sea and its waves himself. In July 2009 he presented the film at San Diego Comic-Con, ending his American boycott as a favour to John Lasseter, who had pushed Spirited Away into American cinemas. He also co-wrote Arrietty (2010) for Hiromasa Yonebayashi, and for the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, which he helped create and which opened in 2001, he made short films that screen nowhere else.