Hayao Miyazaki

With all the animators in the world at his feet, one would think that Miyazaki’s career was a success from the start. Nothing is further from reality. The Japanese director had to work hard to reach the pinnacle of recognition, first in his country, and then in the West, including the Golden Bear in Berlin and the Oscar for best animated film.

Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941. World War II marked him, although he was only five years old when it ended. Since then, he says, “there are too many things I don’t want to remember.” His father worked in an aviation company, which is why he has maintained his love for flying, a omnipresent theme in his films. In 1958 he saw Byakujaden , Japan’s first color animated feature film. He then decided that he wanted to do that. So even though he went to college and graduated in economics, he spent his free time drawing. Upon graduation he went through the companies Toei Doga and Zuiyo. With this, and in the company of his friend Isao Takahata , he collaborated in 1973 as an animator in mythical series such asHeidi andframe .

But becoming a director was a slow process. He didn’t quite like television, and after making The Castle of Cagliostro in 1979 he got stuck on an idea, which would end up becoming an important title in 1984: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , also called “Warriors of the Wind”. This post-nuclear holocaust vision was previously a manga in the monthly magazine “Animage” as there was no money to produce it.

The success was such that Mayazaki founded Studio Ghibli. There he has directed high-profile films such asPorco Rosso ,The castle in the skyMy Neighbor Totoro ,Nicky, the witch’s apprentice andPrincess Mononoke . OnSpirited Away says, “I wanted to explore the idea of ​​communication. Language means power. In the world where Chihiro is lost, speaking a word is a clear and definite act. When Chihiro says with conviction that he wants to work, the witch Yubaba is unable to stop him. Today language has become cheaper and is not given importance. Proclamations are worthless. We negotiate the weight of words. It’s something serious. In the film, the fact of taking a person’s name means totally dominating him.”

Mayazaki promised himself from the beginning not to copy others, nor to fall into the fever of the sequels. Each film takes many hours of hand drawing, and he has only recently started to use the computer a bit. He knows that the path he has chosen is “high risk, high quality, high cost”, but he thinks it is worth it. “I work the lines very hard. My characters may not be three-dimensional, but their strokes are alive. And the colors are very subtle.” Thus, with the patience of a monk before the illuminated codex, Mayazaki has turned his animation works into “animated poetry”. For many years.