Hayao Miyazaki In an era of high-tech wizardry, the anim auteur makes magic the old way By Tim Morrison

Edited from: http://www.time.com/time/asia/2006/heroes/at_miyazaki.html For more than 20 years, the Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki has been crafting films more lusciously illustrated and rapturously imaginative than almost anything else on the silver screenfull of spirits, walking castles, flying machines, cat buses and owl-raccoons called totoros (which only children can see). A fearsomely handson artist who does everything from scriptwriting to storyboard sketching to correcting many of the final frames of his movies by hand, Miyazaki is Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles combined, with a dash of Claude Monet in his sumptuous landscapes and more than a smidgen of Roald Dahl in his sly, sophisticated understanding of children. Miyazaki was not the founding father of Japanese animation. Its first master was Osamu Tezuka, creator of iconic characters like Astro Boy; it was Tezuka who pioneered the "big eyes" style of Japanese illustration and inspired every spiky-haired hero who ever took up arms against a giant robot. But more than that of any other director, Miyazaki's name and that of his animation house Studio Ghibli have become synonymous with Japanese animation. "He's a wonderfully creative storyteller who has somehow found a way to tell the stories that he wants, and that puts him in an incredibly small bracket of writer-directors worldwide," says Jonathan Clements, co-author of The Anime Encyclopedia. "All the smaller in that his works are also blockbuster successes." Princess Mononoke, an ecological fable set in Japan's distant past, was the country's top-grossing movie until Titanic eclipsed it in 1997; Miyazaki reclaimed the title in 2001 with the Oscar-winning Spirited Awaythe tale of a 10-year-old's quest to deliver her parents from a spell that has turned them into pigs. Like many of Miyazaki's films it's a rumination on the importance of self-reliance, selflessness and the challenge of growing up. This thematic richness is key, says Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki: "Our films are the result of serious and earnest consideration of what kind of films should be made for children." What makes Miyazaki's movies all the more remarkable is that in an era when each computer-animated feature from the likes of Pixar and Disney is more kinetic than the lastCars! Toys! Fish!he continues to handcraft a world of Zen-like stillness and beauty: water dripping on mossy rocks, or a train gliding over the sea in twilight. The dramatic punch is delivered not with a showstopping musical number or high-tech wizardry but with simple, stunning imagery that still takes your breath away.

Midnight Eye Interview: Hayao Miyazaki Edited from: http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/hayao_miyazaki.shtml There is little doubt about Hayao Miyazaki's status as Japan's premiere animator. After such devastating successes as Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke, not even the lure of early retirement could keep the most famous founding father of Studio Ghibli from delivering what would become the most successful film of all time in Japan:

Spirited Away (Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi). The interview below is a report of the debate / press conference Miyazaki gave in Paris in late December 2001, on the occasion of Spirited Away's first European screening at the animation festival Nouvelles images du Japon (during which the French government bestowed on him the title of 'Officier des Arts et des Lettres'). It contains questions from various people, including my own. Is it true that your films are all made without a script? Thats true. I dont have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually dont have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keeping working on the film as it develops. Its a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, thats the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it. But for that to work I can imagine it would be essential to have a lot of empathy with your characters. What matters most is not my empathy with the characters, but the intended length of the film. How long should we make the film? Should it be three hours long or four? Thats the big problem. I often argue about this with my producer and he usually asks me if I would like to extend the production schedule by an extra year. In fact, he has no intention of giving me an extra year, but he just says it to scare me and make me return to my work. I really dont want to be a slave to my work by working a year longer than it already takes, so after he says this I usually return to work with more concentration and at a much faster pace. Another principle I adhere to when directing, is that I make good use of everything my staff creates. Even if they make foregrounds that dont quite fit with my backgrounds, I never waste it and try to find the best use for it. Spirited Aways lead character Chihiro seems to be a different type of heroine than the female leads in your previous films. She is less obviously heroic, and we dont get to know much about her motivation or background. I havent chosen to just make the character of Chihiro like this, its because there are many young girls in Japan right now who are like that. They are more and more insensitive to the efforts that their parents are making to keep them happy. Theres a scene in which Chihiro doesnt react when her father calls her name. Its only after the second time he calls that she replies. Many of my staff told me to make it three times instead of two, because thats what many girls are like these days. They dont immediately react to the call of the parents. What made me decide to make this film was the visualizing that there are no films made for that age group of ten-year old girls. It was through observing the daughter of a friend that I visualize there were no films out there for her, no films that directly spoke to her. Certainly, girls like her see films that contain characters their age, but they cant identify with them, because they are imaginary characters that dont resemble them at all. With Spirited Away I wanted to say to them dont worry, it will be alright in the

end, there will be something for you, not just in cinema, but also in everyday life. For that it was necessary to have a heroine who was an ordinary girl, not someone who could fly or do something impossible. Just a girl you can encounter everywhere in Japan. Every time I wrote or drew something concerning the character of Chihiro and her actions, I asked myself the question whether my friends daughter or her friends would be capable of doing it. That was my criteria for every scene in which I gave Chihiro another task or challenge. Because its through surmounting these challenges that this little Japanese girl becomes a capable person. It took me three years to make this film, so now my friends daughter is thirteen years old rather than ten, but she still loved the film and that made me very happy. Since you say you dont know what the ending of a story will be when you start drawing storyboards, is there a certain method or order you adhere to in order to arrive at the storys conclusion? Yes, there is an internal order, the demands of the story itself, which lead me to the conclusion. There are 1415 different shots in Spirited Away. When starting the project, I had envisioned about 1200, but the film told me no, it had to be more than 1200. Its not me who makes the film. The film makes itself and I have no choice but to follow. We can see several recurring themes in your work that are again present in Spirited Away, specifically the theme of nostalgia. How do you see this film in relation to your previous work? Thats a difficult question. I believe nostalgia has many appearances and that its not just the privilege of adults. An adult can feel nostalgia for a specific time in their lives, but I think children too can have nostalgia. Its one of mankinds most shared emotions. Its one of the things that makes us human and because if that its difficult to define. Even though we use it in Japan, the word nostalgia is not a Japanese word. The fact that I can understand that film even though I dont speak a foreign language means that nostalgia is something we all share. When you live, you lose things. Its a fact of life. So its natural for everyone to have nostalgia. What strikes me about Spirited Away compared to your previous films is a real freedom of the author. A feeling that you can take the film and the story anywhere you wish, independent of logic, even. Logic is using the front part of the brain, thats all. But you cant make a film with logic. Or if you look at it differently, everybody can make a film with logic. But my way is to not use logic. I try to dig deep into the well of my subconscious. At a certain moment in that process, the lid is opened and very different ideas and visions are liberated. With those I can start making a film. But maybe its better that you dont open that lid completely, because if you release your subconscious it becomes really hard to live a social or family life. I believe the human brain knows and perceives more than we ourselves visually. The front of my brain doesnt send me any signals that I should handle a scene in a certain way for the sake of the audience. For instance, what for me constitutes the end of the film, is the scene in which Chihiro takes the train all by herself. Thats where the film ends for me. I remember the first time I took the train alone and what my feelings were at

the time. To bring those feelings across in the scene, it was important to not have a view through the window of the train, like mountains or a forest. Most people who can remember the first time they took the train all by themselves, remember absolutely nothing of the landscapes outside the train because they are so focused on the ride itself. So to express that, there had to be no view from the train. But I had created the conditions for it in the previous scenes, when it rains and the landscape is covered by water as a result. But I did that without knowing the reason for it until I arrived at the scene with the train, at which moment I said to myself How lucky that I made this an ocean (laughs). There are more profound things than simply logic that guide the creation of the story. Other than some Japanese animation we get to see on this side of the world, your films always express a sense of positivity, hope and a belief in the goodness of man. Is this something you consciously add to your films? In fact, I am a pessimist. But when Im making a film, I dont want to transfer my pessimism onto children. I keep it at bay. I dont believe that adults should impose their vision of the world on children, children are very much capable of forming their own visions. Theres no need to force our own visions onto them. But still there are millions of adults that watch your films and who get a lot of enjoyment out of your work. That gives me a lot of pleasure, of course. Simply put, I think that a film which is made specifically for children and made with a lot of devotion, can also please adults. The opposite is not always true. The single difference between films for children and films for adults is that in films for children, there is always the option to start again, to create a new beginning. In films for adults, there are no ways to change things. What happened, happened. Do you believe in the necessity of fantasy in telling childrens stories? I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldnt stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind and of the imagination. Those things can help us in life. But we have to be cautious in using this word fantasy. In Japan, the word fantasy these days is applied to everything from TV shows to video games, like virtual reality. But virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people. Its a dilemma I struggle with in my work, that balance between imaginary worlds and virtual worlds. In both Spirited Away and Porco Rosso there are people who are transformed into pigs. Where does this fascination with pigs come from? Thats because theyre much easier to draw than camels or giraffes (laughs). I think they fit very well with what I wanted to say. The behaviour of pigs is very similar to human behaviour. I really like pigs at heart, for their strengths as well as their weaknesses. We look like pigs, with our round bellies. Theyre close to us. What about the scene with the putrid river god? Does it have a base in Japanese mythology?

No, it doesnt come from mythology, but from my own experience. There is a river close to where I live in the countryside. When they cleaned the river we got to see what was at the bottom of it, which was truly putrid. Now theyve managed to clean up the river, the fish are slowly returning to it, so all is not lost. But the smell of what they dug up was really awful. Everyone had just been throwing stuff into that river over the years, so it was an absolute mess. Do your films have one pivotal scene that is representative for the entire film? Because Im a person who starts work without clear knowledge of a storyline, every single scene is a pivotal scene. In the scene in which the parents are transformed into pigs, thats the pivotal scene of that moment in the film. But after that its the next scene which is most important and so on. In the scene where Chihiro cries, I wanted the tears to be very big, like geysers. But I didnt succeed in visualizing the scene exactly as I had imagined it. So there are no central scenes, because the creation of each scene brings its own problems which have their effect on the scenes that follow. But 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 shes full of life and has faced the whole world. Those are two portraits of Chihiro which show the development of her character. Where do your influences lie as far as other films and directors go? We were formed by the films and filmmakers of the 1950s. At that time I started watching a lot of films. One filmmaker who really influenced me was the French animator Paul Grimault. But I watched a lot of films from many countries all over the world, but I usually cant remember the names of the directors. So I apologise for not being able to mention any other names. Another film which had a decisive influence on me was a Russian film, The Snow Queen. Contemporary animation directors I respect a lot are Yuri Nordstein from Russia and Frederick Bach from Canada. Nordstein in particular is someone who truly deserves the title of artist. Does the incredible impact that Spirited Away has had in Japan change anything about your method of working? No. You never know how a film will play, whether it will be successful or not, or whether it will touch the audience. I always said to myself that whatever happens, big audience or small, that I would not let the results have an impact on my way of working. But it would be a bit silly for me to change my methods when I have a big success. That means my methods work well (laughs).