Directors Who Dominate: Hayao Miyazaki

It’s safe to say that Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941) is the world’s most famous living animator. He’s probably the second most successful and beloved animator of all time, behind Walt Disney, but plenty of people would put him atop their personal lists. Miyazaki is more of an auteur than Disney: a mad genius who during his four-decade directorial career created highly distinctive films that always returned to the same set of themes — aviation, the environment, Japanese modernity and tradition, and growing up.

If Disney movies have been accused, sometimes unfairly, of being retrograde and light on substance, the same cannot be said of Miyazaki’s work. He typically spoke through rich female protagonists that are powerful and believable. His male characters are not the swaggering or “Chosen One” types that dominate Western children’s fiction, but are earnest and thoughtful. Nearly all Miyazaki characters, even the antagonists, are well-intentioned and conscious of their responsibilities to the worlds they inhabit.

Miyazaki’s movies usually take place in what genre fiction fans refer to as low-magic fantasy settings. He rotated between three kinds of locations: wholly imaginary worlds, usually with a steampunk or post-apocalyptic flavor; quaint European cities of prewar vintage; and historical, typically rural Japan.

Wherever they are set, Miyazaki’s movies tell stories that are relatable and applicable. He populated them with real people who face down-to-earth challenges. The title character of Kiki’s Delivery Service must become independent and learn to provide for herself; the fact that she is a witch is incidental to her growth into young adulthood.  Environmental degradation is creatively abstractified in Spirited Away, but it is unmistakably central to its star’s janitorial job in a spa for Japanese nature spirits.

Now that Miyazaki has retired (perhaps temporarily) to a quiet life of tooling around in the vintage Citroën he has driven for years, it is possible to see how he developed this set of defining themes and trends over the course of his career. His directorial debut was 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro, a well-regarded installment in Japan’s longrunning Lupin the Third franchise, but he did not achieve real control over stories and styles until his early 40s when he wrote and illustrated his first manga (comic book), adapted it into a movie, and launched his studio. Let’s take a look at the 13 full-length movies he directed or wrote between 1984 and 2013: the Studio Ghibli Era.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

• Released in 1984
• Japanese title: Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 243

Inspired by the atomic carnage of the Second World War, Japanese blockbuster films like Godzilla with their oversized kaiju, the Cold War standoff between superpowers and non-aligned nations, and the utopian, nature-centric idealism of its creator, Nausicaä has deep roots for an effectively debut work. It is a fully-realized and artfully-expressed collection of statements about the environment, war, and self-sacrificing heroics — ideas that Miyazaki would rephrase again and again. Joe Hisaishi wrote the music, a modernistic work that pivots between surreal and suspenseful, and he would go on to scores almost all of Miyazaki’s films.

The archetypal but larger-than-life characters, the ambitious story, and the look of a post-industrial Earth had to be worked out in advance by Miyazaki as a serialized manga (comic book) in order to create a fanbase and secure financial backing for the project. The thorough preparation of Miyazaki and his production partners Toshio Suzuki and Isao Takahata paid off, and Nausicaä’s modest success was enough to allow them to form the revolutionary animation house Studio Ghibli.

Castle in the Sky

• Released in 1986
• Japanese Title: Tenshiro no Laputa (Laputa: Castle in the Sky)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 288

Castle in the Sky has become one of the most highly-regarded Miyazaki titles in Japan. Like Nausicaä, it takes place in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, and it repeats many of the same ideas about the trajectory of scientific civilization and the role of humans in preserving a fragile environment. It is visually compelling throughout, with dusty retro-future cityscapes and some of the most intense of Miyazaki’s many depictions of flying and falling. For viewers who saw it on its release, it may have stood out as the best-looking anime to that point in history. It has more moving pieces and moving layers per frame than Nausicaä, though its characters and action are more cartoonish than the elegant fantasy art of the latter movie. But as the first anime produced under the Ghibli label, Castle in the Sky largely supplanted Nausicaä as the template by which Miyazaki’s subsequent work is judged.

My Neighbor Totoro

• Released in 1988
• Japanese Title: Tonari no Totoro (Neighbor Totoro)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 140

My Neighbor Totoro is the very soul of sweet. That description may poison the well for viewers who are reflexively cynical, but Totoro earns its sweetness through some of the most ingenious fantasy mythmaking since Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It stars two sisters aged 5 and 11 who experience loneliness due to a father who works long hours away from home, fear for their mother who is hospitalized with a long-term ailment, and some mutual sisterly resentment. These challenges are amplified by a move to a dusty old house in the Japanese countryside. Totoro was the first Miyazaki movie set in Japan, and he makes it a lush, mysterious setting that feels ancient despite the light rains and bright greens of a young spring. It is also an abode of spirits: the rabbit-eared, bear-like totoro. These creatures are benevolent but aloof, and their cuddly appearance belies their great power over wind and trees. They are embodiments of Miyazaki’s bottomless well of love and reverence for the natural world, and they have become the enduring symbols of Studio Ghibli itself. Totoro‘s success was facilitated in part by a plush toy giveaway that coincided with its initial TV airing in Japan. Today, stuffed characters from the movie can be found in a large percentage of Japanese homes, schools, and businesses. Yep, I’ve got one, too.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

• Released in 1989
• Japanese Title: Majo no Takyubin (The Witch’s Delivery Service)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 550

With Kiki’s Delivery Service, Miyazaki, now established as a master of sophisticated, artful storytelling for all ages, outdid himself and everybody else who had ever tried to capture the gains and losses of growing up. The story of a young witch making her way in a world that has all but forgotten witches is inspiring and bittersweet, adorable and unsparingly honest, uniquely-illustrated but with near-universal truths. Miyazaki’s movies are full of vibrant female role models, but Kiki provides the greatest number and the most diversity. Where a typical fantasy story might pair its young wunderkind with an older, sagacious magician, Kiki looks up to a self-assured girl who is only slightly older than herself but who has already made the leap into young adulthood. An elderly woman forms a bond with Kiki around their shared preference for wood-fired over electrical ovens, and a third stage in life is illustrated by Kiki’s kind landlady, a pregnant woman in her late 20s or 30s who manages the business where Kiki finds work, room, and board. Kiki‘s world is Miyazaki’s most ambitious and exquisitely crafted. It is pastiche of continental Europe, drawing architecture and fashion from Italy, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. Miyazaki clearly admires the Old World gentility of la belle epoch, but he is also fascinated by the technology of the early 20th century, particularly transportation and flight. He fuses Bavarian bakeries and Victorian parlors with the cable cars, vintage automobiles, and zeppelins of the interwar period to create, for the first but not the last time, a uniquely Miyazakian world.

This is the only movie for which Miyazaki served as his own producer, and he nearly bankrupted the studio just as it was becoming a major power. Though not personally a spendthrift — at Ghibli he nearly always ate a boxed lunch packed for him by his wife Akemi, to whom he has been married since 1965 — he ran over budget and behind deadlines. He spent hours trying to perfect the way Kiki’s skirt billowed in the wind, and he sent a team of illustrators on a European tour of at least half a dozen nations to study the architecture. Suzuki, Miyazaki’s usual producer, took the reins back afterward and never returned them.

Porco Rosso

• Released in 1992
• Japanese Title: Kurenai no Buta (The Crimson Pig)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 659

Miyazaki put the theme of flight front and center for his first movie starring an adult character. Marco Pagot is an anthropomorphic pig, but he was once a man – an Italian WWI fighter pilot, to be precise. Now he is a mercenary smuggler who operates out of a secluded cove and flirts with his human ladyfriend in an expatriate bar straight out of Casablanca. This story was probably lurking in Miyazaki’s mind for quite a while: the name “Ghibli” comes from a 1930s Italian fighter plane. Porco Rosso is a gorgeous, funny, irreverent movie steeped in nostalgia, but between its fist fights and its haunting tributes to the Lost Generation there is still room for another of Miyazaki’s great young female characters, Fio Piccolo, an ace aircraft designer and mechanic. Miyazaki hoped to return to the world of Porco Rosso for a prequel in which his anti-fascist pig would have run guns for freedom fighters during the Spanish Civil War. Here’s hoping he’ll come out of retirement and make it happen.

Whisper of the Heart

• Released in 1995
• Japanese title: Mimi wo Sumaseba (If You Listen Closely)
• Written by Hayao Miyazaki, directed by Yoshifumi Kondo
• Flickchart Ranking: 1162

Ghibli had produced a few titles neither written nor directed by Miyazaki, but Whisper of the Heart was the first one for which he split credit, writing it but not directing. It is an exceptionally well-crafted story even by Ghibli standards, and not for nothing: the movie is, in many ways, a thesis about artisanship. Those who have tried their hand at any kind of creative act, or those who have wanted to, should feel a deep fellowship with Shizuku, a middle school girl. Those who have not done so might find her obsessions arbitrary, her reactions irrational, and the story slow. It is not slow, but the important moments happen beneath the surface and within the characters as they grow and strive and make personal decisions and reveal new facets. Whisper of the Heart is not fantastical, though a fantasy story plays an important role in it and there are animal companions, images of people flying through the air, whiffs of old Europe, and other elements that make a Ghibli movie a Ghibli movie. For the most part it takes place in real Japan, on the concrete roads of Tokyo, and that world is animated in exquisite detail. But it is the artistry of Miyazaki’s screenplay that steals the show, with its piercing characterizations of children and parents, boys and girls, teachers and retirees, and its consideration of the inner lives of inanimate objects like grandfather clocks and cat-shaped dolls. Whisper of the Heart is why everyone in Japan knows the John Denver song “Country Roads.” It is also the only Ghibli movie to spawn a spinoff, 2002’s disappointing The Cat Returns, which Miyazaki had nothing to do with.

Princess Mononoke

• Released in 1997
• Japanese title: Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 372

Princess Mononoke was Ghibli’s most successful film to date, finding fans among growing legions of anime buffs in North America and around the world. Within a few years of its release it was the top-selling anime in the United States. For his return to directing Miyazaki had been leaning toward a story about a small bug, but his longtime producer Suzuki talked him into pursuing his second choice, Mononoke. Of all the creative worlds Miyazaki’s imagination has spawned, this is probably the strangest. The setting is medieval Japan, along the wild northern frontier among the tribal, ethnically-distinct, long-lost Emishi people. The thick forests are home to enormous animal spirits, one of whom sets the film’s uncharacteristically bloody tone in a frightful opening sequence. The titular princess, really a feral guardian of the forest, marks her dramatic appearance with blood, too, sucking from a wolf’s wound to heal it and reddening her hands and face in the process. It is a striking image, and would have been a career highlight even for Akira Kurosawa, master of medieval Japanese war epics. Except for the fact that the main character of Mononoke is a young man, and that Miyazaki’s beautiful images are now achieved partly by computer modeling, the movie is strikingly similar to his first two pictures, Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky. As in those movies, a pair of young people must defend the natural world from the depredations of rival factions. Miyazaki’s early titles had elements of darkness, but Mononoke is far grittier and more ambiguous; success, if it comes at all, is costly and incomplete.

Spirited Away

• Released in 2001
• Japanese title: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 280

Spirited Away may forever be Miyazaki’s most well-known work in the United States for the simple fact that it gave him his only Academy Award, for Best Animated Feature. It received superlative praise from critics, many of whom were probably encountering Miyazaki for the first time. As Miyazaki’s seventh directorial feature, nothing about Spirited Away was exactly new: fans of his work had already seen lots of brave young girls in fantastical Japanese settings and had heard his environmental messages. But Spirited Away deserved every bit of the praise it received. Its artwork is stunning; Miyazaki plays with light, water, and transparency in a way that few thought possible for a cartoon. He frames some scenes with perfect symmetry, others at precise angles to highlight the richest “sets” and backgrounds in his ouvre. A spa for spirits, glowing and hazy as though in soft focus, makes a wonderful island universe. Two supporting characters, a giant radish spirit and a greedy ghost in black robe and white mask, instantly became two of Miyazaki’s most beloved creatures despite not uttering a word. The movie features a strong villain and an imaginative, fantasy-tinged romance between the protagonist, Chihiro, and a boy named Haku who can take the shape of a gleaming dragon. Spirited Away is a perfect introduction to Miyazaki, and it marks the high point of his international success.

Howl’s Moving Castle

• Released in 2004
• Japanese title: Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 650

Howl’s Moving Castle is more well-known in the West than some of Miyazaki’s early work, but for Japanese audiences it did too little to set itself apart from the crowd. On the surface, Miyazaki’s usual elements are all here: a courageous young woman, a serious young man, an aged sorceress, a female warlord, animal and supernatural companions, European-inspired backdrops, steampunk technology… It’s not the repetition of a great formula that’s the problem, but an uncharacteristic lack of substance. The characters feel shallower than their predecessors, and their motivations are vague and perfunctory. They meander through the movie almost aimlessly, as does the plot. Some fans of the film have argued that it exhibits a characteristically Asian mode of storytelling, but the best bits of Asian folklore in the Ghibli canon, Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, are far tighter. Miyazaki generally communicates big ideas through subtle characters, and here he achieves neither. There is great visual beauty in Howl’s, though, and it rewards additional viewings.

Ponyo

• Released in 2008
• Japanese title: Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 1562

Miyazaki returned to a Japanese setting for 2008’s Ponyo and found an exciting and radical new angle to express his environmental concerns. Instead of resisting a violent destruction of the environment, Ponyo’s protagonists help to bring about an explosive oceanic revival that virtually wipes out civilization; the people survive, but they are confined to boats and bubbles of space amid a prehistoric sea. Miyazaki understands that children have a great capacity for appreciating wondrous and sublime things, and especially for internalizing fun facts about the world, as anyone who ever went through a dinosaur phase will remember. The kids in Ponyo, a young boy and a fish who can take the form of a young girl, rattle off the names of long-extinct, Devonian-era creatures that glide beneath their plastic boat. Water is pervasive in this story and seems to take on a new texture in every scene, from the tranquility of a moonlit sea to the curious physics of bubbles to the inescapable, town-destroying violence of a tsunami. The tsunami sequence, which plays to a song reminiscent of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” is poignant in light of the destruction that visited Japan a few years after the movie’s release, and for pure visual spectacle it rivals anything in Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. Ponyo is based loosely on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, but Miyazaki’s artistry remains as original as ever.

The Secret World of Arrietty

• Released in 2010
• Japanese title: Kari-gurashi no Arietti (The Borrower Arrietty)
• Written by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi
• Flickchart Ranking: 2216

Arrietty was the first Ghibli feature since 1995 that Miyazaki wrote but did not direct, and the first for which he shared a writing credit. Naturally the star is an optimistic and courageous young woman. She and her family are just inches tall, and eke out a precarious existence from the ecosystem in and around a human house. The detail-driven Ghibli animators have plenty of opportunities to dissect the minutia of daily life in search of overlooked beauty and power. One bay leaf and a single cube of sugar can help feed Arrietty’s family for a year. To them a garden is a jungle, a pill bug is the relative size of a basketball, and the beating of a crow’s wings are the equivalent of a hurricane. Yet, as in Howl’s Moving Castle, the commitment to characters here is less than the commitment to the world. Arrietty’s mother is forever frazzled and easily brought to a near-insensible state of panic, while her father is the typical strong and silent type stripped down to its broadest, blandest outline. A human housekeeper, Haru, is uncharitably depicted as a troll-like creature, and there are no motivations behind her cruelty to the Borrowers. Arrietty’s generic brand of touchingly naive bravery is too basic to compensate for these shortcomings. The extent of Miyazaki’s contributions to the script are unclear, but since he had been contemplating an adaptation of this English folk tale for decades, he should have brought more to it.

From Up on Poppy Hill

• Released in 2011
• Japanese title: Kokurikozaka Kara (From Coquelicot Hill)
• Written by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, directed by Goro Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 6172

The early 1960s was a time of rapid change for Japan. Like an Ozu film, a full appreciation of From Up on Poppy Hill requires some understanding of history. (It also requires watching it in Japanese; viewers who can read at subtitle speed should watch Ghibli movies with their original language tracks rather than the rewritten Disney dubs, though the accuracy of the subtitles often leaves much to be desired as well.) The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 are on the horizon, and Japan’s building boom looms over all. Much of the urban scenery in the movie is under construction, and an agitated group of students observes that Japan is “building a new society on the ruins of the old.” The old society, of course, was a casualty of the war, and the war imposed great personal loss for the film’s main characters, a boy and a girl in a Yokohama high school. Born at the breaking point, their only links to the past are old photographs that they reverently guard. The teenagers each exhibit a deep longing to connect with the past — not only their personal pasts, represented by the people they have lost, but also the physical past of beloved old buildings threatened by runaway development. These themes fit perfectly in the Ghibli canon, so Miyazaki’s contributions to this script were perhaps greater here than in Arrietty. His son Goro Miyazaki directed, and despite lackluster reviews, the movie’s profound intelligence and beauty prove that Goro can take up his father’s mantle if he chooses to do so.

The Wind Rises

• Released in 2013
• Japanese title: Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)
• Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
• Flickchart Ranking: 2706

Miyazaki’s final feature is his most personal. The central figure, an adult man named Jiro Horikoshi, is loosely based on the real-life designer of Japan’s infamous Zero fighter plane. The only powers at his disposal are inventiveness and idealism, but these are sufficient to transport him around the world, through decades of time, and into a romance worthy of a Hollywood Golden Age melodrama. In his dreams, he walks on the wings of impossible aircraft with his turn-of-the-century Italian mentor, but he also has disturbing presentiments of fiery crashes and the coming ruin of Japan and Europe. He sees Japan change from the ox-powered rural society of his childhood through the rebirth of Tokyo after the great 1923 earthquake to the militarized state of the 1930s. Like many other people of his generation, he admires and emulates the West for its perceived technical superiority, but he knows that Japan must find its own way forward. He would rather its path be peaceful, and for his planes to carry passengers instead of bombs, but a designer must design what is in demand. Miyazaki’s father worked in aircraft engineering as well, and he contributed to the Zero, which helps to explain Miyazaki’s recurring fascination with the topic and the era. Yet Miyazaki is clearly a pacifist, and in “The Wind Rises” he pulls off a delicate trick: to make the audience love the planes and their designer but hate the war they enabled. The movie is also successful artistically. Wind, an invisible force, is made manifest in flaming debris, a lost umbrella, waving hair, and rippling grass. It is captivating, and when Jiro describes wind as “beautiful” it seems a delightfully eccentric but perfectly appropriate word.

 

The kinds of stories and modes of animation that Miyazaki mastered are his gift to the world. His life’s work, now nearly complete except perhaps for a series of shorts available exclusively at the Ghibli Museum near Tokyo, has inspired and uplifted viewers of all ages and backgrounds.

Studio Ghibli continues to make movies that are events in Japan and around the world. Its staff is capable of achieving greatness without Miyazaki — 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies and 1991’s Only Yesterday, both written and directed by Takahata, are essential viewing. Yet Miyazaki’s peerless body of work will always be a benchmark by which Ghibli’s efforts, and the efforts of all other animators, are judged.

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