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Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki, born 1941 in Tokyo, is a director of Japanese animated films and co-founder of Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki is the creator of many popular anime feature films, as well as manga. Although largely unknown in the West outside of animation circles until Miramax released his film Princess Mononoke in 1999, his films have enjoyed commercial and critical success in Japan and East Asia. Miyazaki's Spirited Away is the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan; Princess Mononoke also held the same title for a short period.

Miyazaki's films are distinguished by recurring themes such as humanity's relationship to nature and technology, and the difficulty of maintaining a pacifist ethic. The protagonists of his movies are often strong, independent girls or young women; the "villains" are often ambiguous characters with redeeming qualities.

Miyazaki's films have generally been financial successes. His success has invited comparisons with American animator Walt Disney. However, Miyazaki does not see himself as a person building an animation empire, but as an animator lucky enough to have been allowed to make films with his own personal touch.

Miyazaki first gained recognition while working as an in-between artist on the Toei production of Gariba no Uchuu Ryokou (1965) (U.S. title: Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon). He thought the original ending in the script was lacking, and pitched his own idea, which became the ending used in the final film.

A few years later Miyazaki played an important role as chief animator, concept artist, and scene designer on Hols: Prince of the Sun (1968), a landmark animated film directed by Isao Takahata, with whom he would continue to collaborate for the next three decades. In Kimio Yabuki's Puss in Boots (1969), Miyazaki again provided key animation, storyboards, designs, story ideas, and image boards for key scenes in the film, including the final chase in Lucifer's castle. Shortly thereafter, Miyazaki proposed scenes in the screenplay for The Flying Ghost Ship, in which military tanks would march into downtown Tokyo and cause massive havoc, and was hired to storyboard and animate those scenes. Later in 1971, Miyazaki played a decisive role developing structure, characters, and designs for Animal Treasure Island and Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, earning credit for Idea Construction and Organization for the two films respectively, as well as storyboarding and animating pivotal scenes in both.

Miyazaki left Toei in 1971 for A Pro, where he co-directed episodes #7-8, #10-11, and #13-23 of the first Lupin III series with Isao Takahata. He and Takahata then began pre-production on a Pippi Longstockings series and drew extensive image boards. However, while on a trip to Sweden the original author, Astrid Lindgren, did not give them permission to continue the project, and it was cancelled. Instead of Pippi, Miyazaki conceived, wrote, designed, and animated the two Panda Go Panda! shorts which were directed by Isao Takahata. Miyazaki's first film as a director was The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), a light-hearted adventure film based on Lupin III, an extensive Japanese television series and film franchise.

The director's next film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) (Kaze no Tani no Naushika), was an epic adventure featuring many distinctive themes that reappear in later films: a concern with ecological issues, a fascination with aircraft, and the absence of a traditional villain. He adapted it from the manga of the same name, which he had himself created two years earlier (this was the first film which he had both written and directed). Following the success of Nausicaä, Miyazaki co-founded the animation production company Studio Ghibli with Isao Takahata, and has produced nearly all of his subsequent work through it.

Miyazaki continued to gain recognition with his first three films made through Studio Ghibli. Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) recounts the adventure of two orphans seeking a magical floating island. My Neighbor Totoro (1988) (Tonari no Totoro) tells of the adventure of two girls and a magical creature called a "totoro." Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) is the story of a small-town teenage witch who strikes out on her own in a big city.

Porco Rosso (1992) was something of a departure for Miyazaki, in that the main character was an adult male, an anti-fascist aviator transformed into an anthropomorphic pig. The film is a light-hearted adventure set in a fictional world based on 1920s Italy where bounty hunters, aviators, and air pirates battle in the skies. The movie explores the tension between selfishness and duty. Many also see the film as being an abstract self-portrait of the director himself, something of a fictionalized autobiography.

Miyazaki's next film, Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime), released in 1997, returns to the ecological and political themes of Nausicaä. The main plot is an epic struggle between the animal gods who rule the forest and the humans who are trying to exploit it for industry. The film was a huge commercial success in Japan, where it became the highest grossing film of all time, until the later success of Titanic, and it ultimately won Best Picture at the Japanese Academy Awards. Miyazaki retired after making Princess Mononoke, intending it to be his last film as a director.

After an extended vacation of spending time with the daughters of a friend, one of whom became the inspiration for Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, "Sen & Chihiro's spiriting away"), the story of a girl who is forced to survive in a bizarre spirit world, enlisted to work in a bathhouse for spirits and gods after her parents are turned into pigs. The film, released in Japan in July 2001, broke the attendance and box office records previously set by Titanic with ¥30.4 billion (almost $300,000,000) in total gross earnings from over 23 million viewings. It has received numerous film awards, including Best Picture at the 2001 Japanese Academy Awards, Golden Bear (First Prize) at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival, and the 2002 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the first Oscar awarded to an anime production. In 2005, Miyazaki was awarded for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival.

In July 2004, Miyazaki finished production on Howl's Moving Castle, a film adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones' fantasy novel of the same name, for which he came out of retirement again, following the sudden departure of original director Mamoru Hosoda. The film premiered at the 2004 Venice International Film Festival and won the Golden Osella award for animation technology. On November 20, 2004, Howl's Moving Castle opened to general audiences in Japan and earned ¥1.4 billion in its first two days, continuing the record-setting trend of Miyazaki films at the box office. The English dubbed version was released in the U.S. through Walt Disney on June 11, 2005.

One of the most distinctive traits of Miyazaki's later films that sets them apart from certain Western animation is the lack of stereotypically "good" or "bad" characters. His characters have complex motivations, and while some can be better or worse than others, they are often capable of growth and change. For example, Lady Eboshi from Princess Mononoke stands in opposition to the other main characters, and her ironworks blatantly exploit the nearby forests for raw materials. However, her character doesn't fit into the standard role of villain: the viewer sees how she provides a productive home for lepers and former prostitutes in her city. Lady Eboshi and Princess Mononoke also exemplify the environmental ethic apparent in much of Miyazaki's work, although even this commitment is never presented in "black and white": Mononoke is resolved when Lady Eboshi's industrial city reconciles itself with its "primitive" neighbors.

Some of Miyazaki's early films, however, featured undeniably evil villains (Count Cagliostro in Castle of Cagliostro or Muska in Laputa: Castle in the Sky), while others are remarkable for having no villain at all (Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro).

Many of Miyazaki's work are styled as bildungsroman, i.e. they depict the path of personal growth and change of the main character. In the beginning, the protagonist (almost always a girl) is described as naive, dependent on others, or selfish. As the story precipitates into a crisis, the character is confronted with challenges, failure and hardships, which she learns to overcome by relying on her own will and inner strength. In the end she's able to make her own decision and strike out of her own. This change is also achieved through exposure to life's major realities, love (life), and old age (death). Most of Miyazaki's movies feature a boy co-protagonist, who will later become the first romantic relationship of the character, and an old woman, who starts out as an antagonist, but later reveals her good side and motherly nature, providing essential help. The "grandmother figure" may mean that, as a person achieves maturity, their attitude toward old age changes from opposition to acceptance.

For example, in Laputa, at the start, Sheeta is so naive that she literally "falls from the clouds". By learning to trust the brash Pazu, and with the help of the not-so-ferocious pirate Dola, she finally saves her own world from destruction. In Spirited Away, the initially selfish Chihiro risks her life to save her beloved Haku and her parents.

Specific visual elements recur in many of Miyazaki's films. Particularly in his later work, he occasionally dedicates a few seconds of film to explore a quiet moment in the animated environment. The image of wind moving in long waves across a field of grass or grain has been used in many of his films, as is a closeup shot of a stone or boulder darkening with raindrops. These brief sequences, usually no longer than five or six seconds, are often instrumental in establishing the larger "reality" of his animated world.

Another visual element common to Miyazaki's films is the use of character designs that, at the most basic level, are quite similar. This is often humorously considered an artistic perception that such characters are actors and actresses, reappearing in different films of his.

Flight by the characters is a very common occurrence in Miyazaki's films, lauded for their ability to often look very natural and not "forced". Examples include Nausicaä piloting Mehve, Kiki riding her broomstick, Totoro carrying Satsuki and Mei across the night sky, Howl and Sophie floating majestically above the town of Market Chipping, or Chihiro being borne by Haku in dragon-form back towards the bathhouse of the spirits to find her parents.

Many of Miyazaki's films also feature a train or airship of some kind.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Hayao Miyazaki".

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