Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki was born on January 5, 1941, in Bunkyō, a ward of Tokyo, the second of four sons ^[1]. His father, Katsuji Miyazaki, worked as a director of Miyazaki Airplane, a family firm that manufactured parts for military aircraft during the Second World War, including components for the A6M Zero fighter ^[2]. The family's connection to aviation left a permanent mark on the boy: airplanes, gliders, and impossible flying machines would fill his films and manga for the rest of his life.

The war shaped his childhood in harsher ways too. The family evacuated Tokyo during the bombing raids, moving to Utsunomiya and then Kanuma, and Miyazaki later recalled the fires and dislocation of those years ^[1]. His mother, Yoshiko, suffered from spinal tuberculosis and spent long stretches bedridden between 1947 and 1955, an ordeal that biographers often connect to the sick mother in My Neighbor Totoro ^[2]. She was, by his own account, a sharp and skeptical woman whose intelligence influenced the strong female characters he would later draw.

As a teenager at Toyotama High School, Miyazaki saw Panda and the Magic Serpent (Hakujaden, 1958), Japan's first color animated feature, and the experience turned his ambitions toward animation ^[1]. He wanted to become a manga artist, and he drew constantly, though he later said he struggled to draw people and defaulted to planes and tanks. He studied political science and economics at Gakushuin University, where he joined a children's literature research group, the closest thing the campus offered to a comics club, and graduated in 1963 ^[2].

In April 1963, Miyazaki joined Toei Animation as an entry-level in-between artist ^[1]. He rose quickly. On the feature Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon (1965) he proposed an idea for the ending that was adopted, an early sign of his storytelling instincts. At Toei he also became active in the studio's labor union, serving as chief secretary while the animator Isao Takahata served as vice-chairman, and the two began a working partnership that lasted for decades ^[2]. In 1965 he married Akemi Ota, a fellow Toei animator; their first son, Goro, was born in 1967 and their second, Keisuke, in 1969 ^[2].

Miyazaki did key animation and scene design on Takahata's ambitious feature The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968), a commercial failure that nonetheless became a touchstone for a generation of Japanese animators ^[1]. He left Toei in 1971 with Takahata for A-Pro, then moved to Zuiyo Eizo (later Nippon Animation), where he contributed to the celebrated World Masterpiece Theater television adaptations, including Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974), for which he produced scene layouts for every episode ^[2].

His directing career began in television with Future Boy Conan (1978), a post-apocalyptic adventure series he oversaw at Nippon Animation ^[2]. The next year he directed his first theatrical feature, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), a caper film now regarded as a classic of the genre despite modest returns on release ^[1]. In 1982 he began serializing the manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in Animage magazine. The manga's popularity persuaded the publisher Tokuma Shoten to finance a film version, which Miyazaki wrote and directed. Released in 1984, Nausicaä was a critical and commercial success, and its earnings made a permanent studio possible ^[1].

In June 1985, Miyazaki, Takahata, and the producer Toshio Suzuki founded Studio Ghibli in Tokyo with backing from Tokuma Shoten ^[1]. The studio's first film under its own name was Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky (1986), a flying-island adventure. It was followed by My Neighbor Totoro (1988), a quiet story of two sisters in the postwar countryside whose forest spirit became the studio's logo and one of the most recognizable characters in world cinema ^[1]. Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), about a young witch finding her footing in a seaside city, was the top-grossing Japanese film of its year ^[2].

The 1990s consolidated his standing. Porco Rosso (1992) indulged his love of seaplanes through the story of a pilot cursed with a pig's face. Then came Princess Mononoke (1997), a violent, morally tangled epic about the war between industry and the forest gods. It briefly became the highest-grossing film ever released in Japan and won the Japan Academy Prize for Picture of the Year, an unprecedented honor for an animated film ^[1]. Its success brought Miyazaki international distribution through a deal between Tokuma and Disney.

Spirited Away (2001) surpassed everything before it. The story of ten-year-old Chihiro, trapped in a bathhouse for spirits, earned more than 30 billion yen at the Japanese box office and held the national record for two decades ^[1]. It shared the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival, the first animated feature to win that prize, and took the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 ^[3]. Among Hayao Miyazaki achievements, these remain the most cited: no other hand-drawn film has matched that combination of commercial and critical triumph. Howl's Moving Castle (2004) and Ponyo (2008) followed, each a major box office success, and in 2005 Venice's film festival gave him a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Hayao Miyazaki behind the films finds a craftsman of unusual stubbornness. He writes his features without completed scripts, developing the story through storyboards while animation is already under way, and he personally reviews and corrects enormous quantities of key animation ^[2]. He has remained committed to drawing by hand, using computer graphics sparingly and only in service of the drawn image. Colleagues have described his perfectionism and long hours as defining conditions of work at Ghibli ^[4].

Certain themes recur so consistently that they amount to a signature. Flight appears in nearly every film, from Nausicaä's glider to Howl's walking castle. His protagonists are most often girls or young women who act with resolve rather than waiting for rescue. Environmental damage and the uneasy relationship between humans and the natural world drive Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo alike ^[1]. War, which he witnessed as a child, is treated without glamour: his stated pacifism and his criticism of militarism have surfaced both in his films and in public statements over the years ^[4].

Miyazaki has also continued to work in print. His Nausicaä manga ran intermittently from 1982 to 1994 and extends far beyond the film's plot, developing into a darker and more ambivalent story across seven volumes ^[2]. He has published essay collections, including Starting Point and Turning Point, which gather decades of interviews and writings on animation, landscape, and children ^[5].

In September 2013, after the release of The Wind Rises, a fictionalized life of the Zero fighter designer Jiro Horikoshi, Miyazaki announced his retirement from feature filmmaking at a Tokyo press conference, citing his age and the physical demands of his methods ^[3]. The retirement did not hold, as several earlier ones had not. He kept a desk at the studio, worked on short films for the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka (which he had designed and which opened in 2001), and in 2016 began developing a new feature ^[1].

That film became The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka), released in Japan in July 2023 with no advance trailer or marketing, an experiment that did not prevent it from becoming a major hit ^[6]. Loosely inspired by his own wartime boyhood, the film follows a grieving boy drawn into a shifting otherworld. It won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Film and then the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in March 2024, making Miyazaki, at 83, the oldest director to win in the category ^[6].

Honors accumulated through these years. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an Honorary Award in November 2014 for his lifetime contribution to film ^[3]. Japan named him a Person of Cultural Merit in 2012, and in 2024 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often described as Asia's version of the Nobel Prize ^[6]. In late 2024 he indicated that he was contemplating yet another film, and Studio Ghibli's leadership has confirmed he continues to come to the studio and draw.

Miyazaki has been married to Akemi Ota since 1965. She gave up her own animation career after the birth of their sons, a sacrifice Miyazaki has acknowledged with regret in interviews ^[2]. Their elder son, Goro Miyazaki, became a landscape architect before turning to animation himself, directing Tales from Earthsea (2006) and From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) for Ghibli; the father and son's working relationship, initially strained, has been documented in the studio's own films and press coverage ^[4].

He lives and works in western Tokyo, near the studio in Koganei. His routines are famously modest for a filmmaker of his stature: he has long driven himself to work, kept up daily drawing, and participated in local river cleanups near his atelier ^[4]. He is a heavy reader of children's literature and European illustration, and he has named writers such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry among his influences.

Politically, Miyazaki has spoken publicly on issues he considers matters of conscience, opposing revisions to Japan's pacifist constitution and criticizing the nostalgia for wartime aircraft that his own film The Wind Rises was sometimes accused of indulging ^[4]. He declined to attend the 2003 Academy Awards ceremony where Spirited Away won, later saying that he had not wanted to visit a country that was then at war in Iraq ^[3].

Few living filmmakers have altered their art form as thoroughly. Miyazaki demonstrated that hand-drawn animation could carry adult moral complexity while remaining beloved by children, and his box office records forced the global industry to treat Japanese animation as mainstream cinema rather than a niche import ^[1]. Directors including John Lasseter of Pixar, who oversaw the English-language releases of several Ghibli films, and Guillermo del Toro have described his influence on their own work in detail ^[3].

The institutions he built continue to grow. The Ghibli Museum draws visitors from around the world on timed tickets that sell out months ahead, and Ghibli Park, a larger attraction built around the studio's film worlds, opened in Aichi Prefecture in 2022 ^[6]. Totoro appeared as a character in Pixar's Toy Story 3, a rare cross-studio tribute, and Ghibli's back catalogue reached global streaming audiences through deals with Netflix and HBO Max in 2020 ^[6].

Straightforward Hayao Miyazaki facts only begin to explain his standing: two competitive Academy Awards, an honorary Oscar, a Golden Bear, a Golden Lion, and the two highest-grossing Japanese films of their eras. What endures beyond the records is a body of work, eleven features of his own and decades of television and manga, that treats children as serious moral beings and the natural world as something owed respect. In 2024 Time magazine included him among the world's most influential people, six decades after he began erasing in-between drawings at Toei ^[6].