Born in Tokyo in January 1941. His father helped run a company that made parts for military aircraft during the war, which is either a biographical footnote or the whole key to the filmography, depending on how literary you want to be. Aeroplanes appear in almost everything he has made, drawn with an affection he plainly finds uncomfortable — a man who loves the machines and despises what they were built for.
Toei, the union, and twenty years of apprenticeship
He joined Toei Dōga in 1963 as an in-betweener, at the bottom of the ladder, and spent his twenties doing union work as much as animation. He was an officer in the labour union; Isao Takahata, five and a half years older, was its chairman. That is how the partnership started — not over a drawing board but over working conditions.
The apprenticeship was long. Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968), Takahata's first feature, with Miyazaki contributing scene design. Then Lupin III episodes, then Future Boy Conan (1978) as his first turn directing a full series, then The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) as his first feature. He was thirty-eight. By the standards of any American career path this is absurdly slow, and it is exactly why the later films are so assured.
The manga that would not stop
Asked for a film, Miyazaki was told he would need an existing property to adapt. He responded by writing one. The Nausicaä manga began serialisation in 1982, ran on and off until 1994, and reaches roughly a thousand pages. The 1984 film adapts about the first fifth of it and stops well before the story turns genuinely bleak.
If you only know the film, the manga is a real shock. Its ecology is colder, its politics dirtier, and its ending refuses the consolation the film offers. I would argue it is his most serious work, and it is not animation at all.
The method: storyboards instead of a script
This is the part that surprises people who work in Western animation. Ghibli features under Miyazaki generally begin with an image board and a partial storyboard — the e-konte — rather than a locked screenplay. Production starts. He keeps drawing. Sequences are storyboarded while earlier sequences are already being animated, so the crew frequently does not know how the film ends because he does not yet know either.
The obvious cost is risk. Spirited Away reportedly ran long enough in its planned form that the story was reshaped mid-production. The Boy and the Heron took about seven years partly because it was drawn at whatever pace its director could manage in his eighties. It is not a method any studio could adopt on purpose. It is a method one studio tolerated because of who was using it.
The retirements
He announced retirement from feature directing after Princess Mononoke in 1997, then made four more. He announced it again, formally and at a press conference, after The Wind Rises in 2013. He then made short films for the Ghibli Museum, and then a feature.
The 2016 NHK documentary Never-Ending Man catches the mechanism honestly: he is not fond of directing, he is worse at not directing. Colleagues describe someone who works to avoid the alternative. The English-language habit of treating each announcement as news says more about us than about him.
The temperament
He is not a gentle man about work, and the films' warmth should not be confused with the workplace that produced them. He has said harsh things about the anime industry, about computer graphics, about his own son's directing, and about audiences. Some of it reads as generational crankiness; some of it reads as a man who takes drawing seriously enough to be rude about it.
He is also the executive director of the Ghibli Museum and designed the building, and the museum's founding document is written in his voice — small children should be treated as though they were adults, visitors should not be herded along a fixed route, exhibits should not be allowed to get dusty. It is the same person: exacting, and specifically interested in whether a child is having a real experience.
The films argue, repeatedly and without saying so, that the world is worth the trouble of looking at closely. That is a strange thing for a pessimist to keep insisting on.
If you want to see the method
- Watch a transition scene twice. The bus stop in Totoro, the train in Spirited Away. Nothing advances. Everything is established.
- Watch the hands. Cooking, sweeping, fastening a strap. These shots exist because salaried animators could afford to make them.
- Watch how villains behave in the last ten minutes. Very few of them are punished. Most are simply outlasted.