Hayao Miyazaki

Trivia

• He is sometimes called the "Walt Disney of Japan", but he hates that title.
• Frequently makes references to nature, ecology, and pollution by humankind in his films, such as Tonari no Totoro (1988), Kaze no tani no Naushika (1984), Mononoke-hime (1997), and Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001).
• He sometimes bases characters in his movies on people he knows in real life. For example, in Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001), Chihiro is based on a daughter of one of his friends.
• Miyazaki once saw "Snezhnaya Koroleva", a Russian animation film directed by Lev Atamanov, at a time when he was unhappy about his job and wondering if he should continue working as an animator. Miyazaki was so moved by it, he "decided to continue working on animation with renewed determination". He says that he learned that characters in animation can act if they are animated well enough, and animation can move people as other media can do.
• Miyazaki built a new studio, "Butaya" (Pig House), near Studio Ghibli as his "retirement place", in 1998.
• Miyazaki says that having children really changed his work. He said he had always tried to make his anime to please his children while they were growing up.
• Miyazaki's second son, Keisuke Miyazaki, made the woodcut print, "Craftsman Making a Violin in Prison", which Shizuku saw in the book in "Whisper of the Heart".
• Miyazaki's first son, Goro Miyazaki, is a landscape designer, and he designed the garden on the rooftop of Studio Ghibli.
• Miyazaki's wife, Akemi Ôta, was also an animator at Toei Douga, the studio where Miyazaki started his career.
• The majority of the characters created by Miyazaki are based on real life people in his life.

Quotes

• "Personally I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making."
• "The illustrators at Pixar are all people I hold dear, we are not in competition. Our relationship is one that is based on friendship."
• "There cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans. However, even in the middle of hatred and killings, there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist. We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. What we should depict is, how the boy understands the girl, and the process in which the girl opens her heart to the boy. At the end, the girl will say
• "Do everything by hand, even when using the computer."
• "I'm actually not that worried. I wouldn't give up on it completely. Once in a while there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You're going to have people in the corners of garages making cartoons to please themselves. And I'm more interested in those people than I am in big business."
• "I think 2-D animation disappeared from Disney because they made so many uninteresting films. They became very conservative in the way they created them. It's too bad. I thought 2-D and 3-D could coexist happily."
• "When I think about the way the computer has taken over and eliminated a certain experience of life, that makes me sad. When we were animating fire some staff said they had never seen wood burning. I said, "Go watch!" It has disappeared from their daily lives. Japanese baths used to be made by burning firewood. Now you press a button. I don't think you can become an animator if you don't have any experience."
• "I can't believe companies distribute my movies in America. They're baffling in Japan! I'm well aware there are spots . . . where I'm going to lose the audience . . . Well, it's magic. I don't provide unnecessary explanations. If you want that, you're not going to like my movie. That's just the way it is."
• "It's difficult. They immediately become the subjects of rorikon gokko [play toy for Lolita Complex guys]. In a sense, if we want to depict someone who is affirmative to us, we have no choice but to make them as lovely as possible. But now, there are too many people who shamelessly depict such heroines as if they just want such girls as pets, and things are escalating more and more."
• "Well, yes. I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy."