1/ Hayao Miyazaki is an animator, filmmaker, and author who has been named as TIME Magazine's 100 World's Most Influential People.
This is a lesson in how one of the most creative minds in animation maintains a child-like curiosity to draw inspiration from everyday life.
This is a lesson in how one of the most creative minds in animation maintains a child-like curiosity to draw inspiration from everyday life.
2/ Miyazaki is born in Tokyo during WWII. His father is a director in a family business that makes parts for fighter planes in the war. His mother lays sick in bed with spinal tuberculosis for most of his childhood. Growing up in a war-torn city shape his anti-war views.
3/ His interest in animation begins after he watches his first full-length cartoon and he begins an apprenticeship at Japan's Toei Animation studio. After working on a few feature films, he releases Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which is a breakout success.
4/ In 1985, he establishes his own studio called Studio Ghibli. Ghibli is a word that Italian pilots once used to describe a wind blowing from the Sahara. To Miyazaki, the name is a message: "let's blow a sensational wind through the Japanese animation world."
5/ The studio produces animation that will "illustrate the joys and sorrows of life as they really are and show how complex the world is and how beautiful the world should be."
6/ In 2001, he releases Spirited Away, which becomes Japan's most successful movie of all time. It receives the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and is the first anime film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
7/ Incredibly, Miyazaki enters all of his films blind and lets them grow organically by taking inspiration from the real world rather than use a preset script. Stories take shape only as the movies are made. He draws upon experiences from his own life, especially from childhood.
8/ "This may sound ridiculous, but I've had staff tell me they have no idea what's going on in my films. When we were making Spirited Away, even I didn't know."
9/ He treats this approach in the same way that he observes children creating art. Children make art just by doing. Children often don't think and instead waste huge amounts of paper and art supplies. They are indifferent to quality and create art in a state of playful thinking.
10/ He views ambiguity as a good place to start: "If you try to convey your own message, you can't make a movie. If you pursue something that you are conscious of, it won't come to a good end. You have to start from what you don't understand as well."
11/ His starting point for a film is often a small visual detail. Miyazaki reads a Japanese translation of a British book, "Howl's Moving Castle," which involves a castle that moves around the countryside. He notices that the book never explains how the castle moves around.
12/ Instead of focusing on other core plot elements, he imagines how the castle might move. Japanese warrior legs? Human feet? One day, he suddenly says "Let's go with chicken feet!" That ends up being the breakthrough which kickstarts his creation of the film.
13/ Miyazaki emphasizes the importance of removing digital distraction and embracing real world experiences. "Young people are surrounded by virtual things. They lack real experience of life and lose their imaginations."
14/ He travels regularly to draw inspiration from daily life and gather mental images. His visits to public bathhouses influence the bathhouse scenes in Spirited Away. He spends 13 years exploring forest settings before creating the setting for Totoro.
15/ For film settings, he often stares at landscapes and develops stories from those views. He gets the idea for Ponyo while living in a house on a cliff with a view of Japan's Inland Sea. He spends months obsessing over the color and texture of the sea-waves that wash ashore.
16/ He knows that children possess the observational power to pick up the small details. He chooses to animate even the smallest hairs on a caterpillar stating that, "no one will notice that Boro's hair is moving, except kids."
17/ In Spirited Away, his staff struggles to draw a pinned down dragon. Miyazaki asks his staff if they've ever seen an eel resisting. "Go to an eel restaurant and see how an eel is gutted."
18/ When he describes a scene where the main heroine forces open the dragon's mouth to give it medicine, he tells his animators to think of what it's like to feed a dog a pill. "The dog clenches its teeth and its gums stick out."
19/ To hammer the point home, he pushes his staff to visit a vet hospital overnight and videotape a golden retriever's gum and teeth so they can study the video at the studio.
20/ Here are some things I love about his movies. He includes moments of emptiness, called "ma" in Japanese. Characters sit for just a moment, or sigh, or look into a running stream, not to advance the story, but only to give the sense of time and place.
21/ "People who make movies are scared of silence, so they want to plaster it over. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness. If you take a moment, the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension."
22/ He makes all of his film protagonists female. "I feel girls are more gallant. When I observed the daughter of a friend, I realized there were no films out there for her, no films that directly spoke to her." There's also a deeper meaning behind this.
23/ When he was a child, his family escaped the fire bombing of his home town in the back of a truck. He recalls a mother and little girl asking to join them but he wasn't strong enough to speak out. They left them behind and this haunts him for years as a "thorn in his heart."
24/ "There are two scenes in Spirited Away that could be considered symbolic for the film. One is the first scene in the back of the car, where she is really a vulnerable little girl, and the other is the final scene, where she's full of life and has faced the whole world."
25/ "With Spirited Away, I wanted a heroine who was an ordinary girl that you could encounter anywhere in Japan. It's through surmounting challenges that this Japanese girl becomes a capable person."
26/ He makes films for children and thinks that is is important for them to see the world positively. "Children are what keep me going. I don't believe that adults should impose their vision of the world on children. Children are very much capable of forming their own visions."
27/ Ironically, he's horrified when mothers tell him their children watch his movies every day. He worries that watching too many movies stimulates only the visual and auditory sensations and deprives children of the world they go out to find, touch, and taste.
28/ When he created the Ghibli Museum, he heard that children were prying open the little windows on a model of a house in the museum and had broken the shutters. He was delighted, and placed tiny pictures inside the model house for kids to see.
29/ He had another idea of making a mountain of dirt at the Ghibli Museum - a mountain with muddy, slippery stretches where children would fall and get scolded by their parents. Unfortunately critics deemed it unsafe so it was never built.
30/ Miyazaki has announced retirement several times, but has always come back to create more. His son says, "He feels alive only when he's making a film. I think he needs to keep fighting in order to live his life. He wants to keep creating until he dies."
31/ "For me, creativity is really like a relay race. As children we are handed a baton. First we need to digest it and make it our own, then we pass it onto the next generation." -Hayao Miyazaki
