Hayao Miyazaki

• 1. The Man Behind the Magic

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  Hayao Miyazaki was born on the 5th of January 1941 in Akebono-cho, Hongō, Tokyo City, the second of four sons in a family that manufactured rudders for fighter planes during World War II. His earliest memories are of bombed-out cities. At age three, his family fled to Utsunomiya; when that city was bombed in July 1945, they evacuated again to Kanuma. The bombing left a mark on a four-year-old boy who had already been told by doctors he would not live beyond age 20, and who considered himself clumsy and weak.

  His mother Yoshiko was a strict, intellectual woman who regularly questioned socially accepted norms. She spent years bedridden with spinal tuberculosis, forcing Miyazaki and his siblings to take over domestic duties. She died in July 1983 at the age of 72, and her influence runs through some of his most memorable characters.

  The film that changed everything came in 1958, when a teenage Miyazaki sneaked out of exam study to see The White Snake Enchantress, Japan's first feature-length color animated film. He later wrote that its pure, earnest world promoted a side of him that yearned desperately to affirm the world rather than negate it. He graduated from Gakushuin University in 1963 with degrees in political science and economics, having spent most of his university years in a comics club where he was sometimes the sole member.

• 2. Climbing the Ranks at Toei

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  In 1963, Miyazaki was hired at Toei Doga in what turned out to be the last year the company hired regularly. He worked as an inbetween artist, a role he found unsatisfying, and quickly pushed to do more expressive work. His proposed changes to the ending of Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon were accepted by its director, though he went uncredited.

  What shaped his path more than any single film was the labor movement at Toei. Miyazaki became chief secretary of the union in 1964. The vice-chairman of that union was Isao Takahata, a director who would become his closest collaborator and lifelong friend. Also in 1964, Miyazaki watched a screening of The Snow Queen and was moved enough to continue working with renewed determination after having considered leaving the animation industry entirely.

  He volunteered in 1964 to work on The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun, directed by Takahata and released in 1968. He served as key animator, concept artist, and scene designer. He worked closely with mentor Yasuo Otsuka on the film, whose approach to animation deeply shaped his own. Though the film was critically praised as pivotal to the evolution of animation, its limited release and minimal promotion led to some of Toei Animation's worst box office results. The studio's financial difficulties from that film contributed to Miyazaki's departure in August 1971.

• 3. From A-Pro to Nausicaa

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  After leaving Toei, Miyazaki followed Takahata and Yoichi Kotabe to A-Pro, where he made his directorial debut. He co-directed 17 of the 23 episodes of Lupin the Third Part I with Takahata, and the two attempted to secure the rights to adapt Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking books. Miyazaki and Tokyo Movie Shinsha president Yutaka Fujioka traveled to Sweden, marking what may have been the first overseas trip by any Japanese animator for a production. When they could not meet Lindgren, permission was refused. Miyazaki recycled the concepts into two Panda! Go, Panda! shorts in 1972 and 1973.

  By 1973, Miyazaki and Takahata had moved to Zuiyo Eizo, where Miyazaki traveled to Switzerland to research the animation series Heidi, Girl of the Alps. He later directed Future Boy Conan in 1978, completing 24 of 26 episodes, each finished within ten to fourteen days. He then moved to Tokyo Movie Shinsha to direct The Castle of Cagliostro, released on the 15th of December 1979. Animage readers voted it the best animation of all time, and it remained in the top ten for more than fifteen years.

  When a magazine approached him for articles, editors Toshio Suzuki and Osamu Kameyama brought his ideas to Tokuma Shoten, but both proposed film projects were rejected. With no films in production, Miyazaki agreed to develop a manga for the magazine. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind ran from February 1982 to March 1994, spanning seven volumes and a combined 1,060 pages. It sold more than ten million copies in its first two years. The manga's character Nausicaa was partly inspired by the figure from Homer's Odyssey, which Miyazaki discovered through Bernard Evslin's Dictionary of Grecian Myths, and the Japanese folk tale The Lady Who Loved Insects.

• 4. Studio Ghibli Is Born

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  On the 15th of June 1985, Miyazaki and Takahata founded Studio Ghibli as a subsidiary of Tokuma Shoten, with offices in Kichijoji designed by Miyazaki. The studio's name came from the nickname of the Caproni Ca.309 aircraft, meaning a hot wind that blows in the desert in Italian. The studio took shape rapidly: up to 70 full-time and 200 part-time employees joined in 1985, many drawn from Telecom, Topcraft, and Toei Doga.

  The first film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, drew partly on Miyazaki's 1984 trip to Wales, where he had witnessed the miners' strike and sketched the communities of Rhondda. He returned in May 1985 to research the film. Laputa was released on the 2nd of August 1986, by the Toei Company and sold around 775,000 tickets.

  My Neighbor Totoro, released on the 16th of April 1988, was only moderately successful at the box office, but Studio Ghibli approved merchandising rights in 1990, and merchandise profits alone sustained the studio for years. The film's home video release in the United States in 1993 sold almost 500,000 copies. An asteroid discovered by Takao Kobayashi in December 1994 was named 10160 Totoro in its honor.

  Kiki's Delivery Service, released on the 29th of July 1989, sold more than 2.6 million tickets and earned 2.15 billion yen at the box office, making it the highest-grossing film in Japan that year.

• 5. Princess Mononoke and the World Stage

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  Princess Mononoke had its roots in sketches Miyazaki made in the late 1970s, inspired by Japanese folklore and the French fairytale Beauty and the Beast. He revisited the project after Porco Rosso gave him more creative freedom, setting the story in the Muromachi period because he felt that was when Japanese people began trying to control rather than worship nature.

  In July 1996, the Walt Disney Company offered Tokuma Shoten a deal to distribute Studio Ghibli's films worldwide through its Buena Vista and Miramax brands. Miyazaki approved, less interested in the money than in supporting Tokuma Shoten.

• 6. Spirited Away and Two Oscars

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  Spirited Away began when Miyazaki realized, during a vacation at a mountain cabin with five young girls who were family friends, that he had never made a film for 10-year-old girls. He read shojo manga magazines like Nakayoshi and Ribon for inspiration and decided to make a film about a female heroine the girls could look up to. Production commenced in 2000 on a budget of 1.9 billion yen.

  The film was released on the 20th of July 2001, and sold a record-breaking 21.4 million tickets, earning 30.4 billion yen at the box office. It became the highest-grossing film in Japan, a record it held for almost 20 years. Spirited Away was the first animated film to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the first Japanese film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

  After announcing retirement in September 2013, Miyazaki returned to make The Boy and the Heron. The film opened in Japanese theaters on the 14th of July 2023, preceded by a minimal marketing campaign that forewent trailers and commercials. It won Miyazaki his second Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 96th Academy Awards, making him the oldest director to win the award and the first two-time Japanese winner in the category. In September 2023, Studio Ghibli vice president Junichi Nishioka said Miyazaki continued to attend the office daily to plan his next film, and Suzuki said he could no longer convince Miyazaki to retire.

• 7. Craft, Conviction, and AI

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  Miyazaki forgoes traditional screenplays entirely, instead developing the narrative as he designs storyboards, saying the studio never knows where the story will go but keeps working as the film develops. He draws each frame by hand and oversees every frame of every film. Computer-generated imagery has been used in several later films since Princess Mononoke to enrich the visual look, but he ensures each film retains the right ratio of handwork and can still be called a 2D film.

  In 2016, Miyazaki was shown an animated zombie generated by artificial intelligence. He was reminded of a friend with a disability and said the animator had no idea what pain is whatsoever. He described the work as an insult to life itself and stated he had no plans to use artificial intelligence at Studio Ghibli. Those comments resurfaced in March 2025 after ChatGPT was updated to produce works resembling artists' styles including Studio Ghibli's.

  Miyazaki was named a Person of Cultural Merit for outstanding cultural contributions in 2012 and received the Academy Honorary Award in 2014. He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2024. His films have been cited as an inspiration for numerous animators, directors, and writers across generations, and Spirited Away remains frequently ranked among the greatest films of the 21st century.