Hayao Miyazaki and the Creation of Studio Ghibli

Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941, the second of four sons in a family that manufactured airplane parts for the Japanese military. His childhood coincided with the firebombing of Tokyo; his first memories of urban Japan were of a city in ruins. He grew up reading manga and became obsessed with animation, joining Toei Animation in 1963 as an in-between artist — the entry-level role of drawing the intermediate frames between key poses that more senior animators produced. He was, by all accounts, extremely good at it, and extremely unhappy doing it.

The path from Toei to Ghibli ran through two decades of animation work on television and film, a creative partnership with Isao Takahata (a director of even greater austerity than Miyazaki, whose "Grave of the Fireflies" and "My Neighbor Yamada" occupy positions at opposite ends of emotional devastation), and the unexpected theatrical success of "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" in 1984 — a film based on Miyazaki's own ongoing manga that performed well enough commercially to justify founding a studio specifically to continue making his films. Studio Ghibli was established in 1985, and its first production was "Castle in the Sky."

The consistency of the Ghibli filmography across four decades is almost without parallel in cinema. The films are visually extraordinary — every frame is composed with a care for light, environment, and movement that reflects decades of accumulated craft — but they are also emotionally intelligent in ways that distinguish them from the mass of animated entertainment. Miyazaki's films are interested in the interiority of their characters, particularly their female protagonists, in a way that many filmmakers working in animation have not been. His heroines are neither passive nor defined by romantic aspiration; they are curious, capable, and allowed to be ambivalent, afraid, and complicated.

"Spirited Away," released in 2001, became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, surpassing "Titanic." It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003, the first non-English-language film to do so. "Princess Mononoke," "Howl's Moving Castle," "My Neighbor Totoro," and "Kiki's Delivery Service" have each achieved the status of cultural classics not merely in Japan but globally — works that are considered, by audiences who have otherwise minimal engagement with animation, to be simply great films.

Miyazaki announced his retirement in 1997, after "Princess Mononoke," and returned to make "Spirited Away." He announced retirement again in 2013, after "The Wind Rises," and returned to make "The Boy and the Heron" (2023), which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He is now in his early eighties and reported to be working on another project. The pattern suggests that retirement is, for him, a condition of recharging rather than stopping. The question of what Ghibli will be after Miyazaki — a question the studio itself is actively working to answer — is one of the more significant open questions in world cinema.