Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hayao Miyazaki was born on the 5th of January 1941 in Akebono-cho, Honjo, Tokyo City, Japan. He is the second of four sons and grew up during World War II, with some of his earliest memories being of bombed-out cities.
Spirited Away won Miyazaki his first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Released on the 20th of July 2001, it was the first Japanese film to win that award and also became the highest-grossing film in Japan, a record it held for almost 20 years.
Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation production company co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata on the 15th of June 1985, as a subsidiary of Tokuma Shoten. The studio's name comes from the nickname of the Caproni Ca.309 aircraft, meaning a hot wind that blows in the desert in Italian.
Hayao Miyazaki has won two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature, for Spirited Away and for The Boy and the Heron. The Boy and the Heron won at the 96th Academy Awards, making Miyazaki the oldest director to win the award and the first two-time Japanese winner in the category.
Miyazaki's films recur with themes of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, love, and family. His narratives often avoid traditional heroes versus unsympathetic villains, and his protagonists are frequently strong girls or young women. Several films address humanity's relationship with nature and the difficulty of maintaining a pacifist ethic in a violent world.
Miyazaki has stated he has no plans to use artificial intelligence at Studio Ghibli and described AI-generated animation as an insult to life itself. In 2016, after being shown an AI-animated zombie, he said the creator had no idea what pain is whatsoever. His comments were widely cited in 2025 when ChatGPT was updated to produce art resembling Studio Ghibli's style.