Hayao Miyazaki, Much More Than The “Japanese Walt Disney”

Hayao Miyazaki. FICG.mx. CC BY 2.0 http://bit.ly/2b744wa

Of all of us from mild to obsessive otakus that have grown up enjoying all kinds of anime, manga and Japanese films, if someone who knows nothing about the genre were to ask us what are the best and most family-friendly anime movies to get started with, it’d be very likely that the first name that comes to our mind is Hayao Miyazaki.

Hayao Miyazaki, chief director of Studio Ghibli for almost 60 years, is considered “the Walt Disney of Japanese animation.” But not because the movies resemble in anything the typical Disney style filled to the brim with princes and princesses, romance and rescuers, heroes and heroines climbing the social ladder and evil characters who are creatively dispatched in each movie – it’s because of the extension and importance that Studio Ghibli’s products have achieved worldwide. In contrast to Disney Movies, the values portrayed in Miyazaki’s creations are more oriented towards the return to nature and simplicity, enjoying family relationships, valuing hard work (like in Mimi wo Sumaseba or Majo no Takkyūbin) and fostering strength and resourcefulness, all of this through the most creative and delightful plots, characters and illustrations.

Hayao Miyazaki was born on the 5^th of January, 1941, in Akebono-cho, Bunkyo-ku District, Tokyo, at the times of WWII. He was the second son, after Arata (born in 1939) of Katsuji Miyazaki, an aeronautical engineer who worked with his brother at Miyazaki Airplane, the family business, devoted to manufacturing rudders of Zero fighter planes. From his father and uncle’s fascinating work, the child Hayao inherited a lifelong passion for aeronautics and flying, which is reflected in many of his most important movies, being one of the clearest examples Kurenai no Buta (1992). The family had to leave from Tokyo when he was only three, and they would not come back until three years later. After their return, his mother, Dola, became ill with spinal tuberculosis, keeping her bedridden for more than nine years – most of Hayao’s childhood. Nevetheless, strict and intellectual, she held great infuence over the young kids, and she had two more children after Hayao, Shirou (birthdate unknown) and Yutaka (born in 1944).

 

The young Hayao Miyazaki also changed schools very often, depending on the family’s needs to move – he attended Utsunomiya City, Omiya Elementary School in Suginami-ku, Eifuku Elementary School, Omiya Junior High, and finally Toyotama High. Together with his mother’s ill health and the country’s generalised distress at the time, this lack of stability exerted a powerful influence on him as well. The future cartoonist was growing up to became an intelligent, brilliant and dreamy young man, yet also aloof, sullen, angry, even a little bit of a misanthrope. He effortlessly indulged in fantasy while painstakingly enduring reality. When he watched the first animated color movie released in Japan in 1958, Hakujaden or The Legend of the White Serpent, he became so spellbound that he himself admitted in a 1988 interview to having literally fallen in love with the main protagonist, the princess Bai-Niang. Actually, many of the subsequent plots of his movies will involve characters undergoing similar magical transformations into animals or fantastic beings, like in Kurenai no Buta (1992), Gake no Ue no Ponyo (2008) or Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (2001).

 

Already before entering Gakushuin University (he graduated in Political Science and Economics in 1963), Hayao Miyazaki already knew that what he really wanted to be was a mangaka: a comic-book artist. He joined the Children’s Literature Research Club while in college, the closest to a manga club these days. Inspired, like so many other youths with the same ambitions, by the great master Osamu Tezuka, he too had a passion for the Western culture and fostered an image of friendly multiculturalism throughout his films, in spite of having lived first-hand the shock and destruction of the war and the consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Movies like Kurenai no Buta (1992), Kaze Tachinu (2013), Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (1984), the animated series Mirai Shōnen Konan (1978; this was his first work as a director for Nippon Animation) and above all Horatu no Haka (1988) deal with the issue of warfare and the results of senseless confrontation amongst human beings; although also Mononoke Hime (1997), Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (2004), Tenkû no Shiro Laputa (1986) and Pom Poko (1994) can also be considered films that, directly or indirectly, deal with the subject of war, anihilation of living species and environments and even genocide (the Tanuki people in Pom Poko, for instance). How these movies can be stirring, tender, uplifting and bright while having such undeniably heart-rending undertones is one of the particular magic effects produced by Miyazaki and Ghibli Studio, an effect that is very rarely achieved in other works of anime, or even common films or shows, in such a perfect balance. Leaving aside the most innocent ones, the great bulk of Miyazaki’s movies (and the most popular ones, in fact) are delightfully atrocious and dreadfully lovely, although in such a subtle way that your mind simply goes through the plot dazzled by the beauty and barely noticing (or not wanting to notice) the fear, the abandonment, the underlying horror. Like life itself, in times of war.

 

The man that Hayao Miyazaki has come to be, a man of sharp contrasts, with his characteristic pure white hair and beard and pitch-black eyes, eyebrows and glasses, with his serene and surly demeanour, has created one of the most outstanding animation empires around the world. After working for Toei Animation, Nippon Animation, A Pro, Zuiyô Pictures, Telecom and many others, together with Isao Takahata, Yasuyoshi Tokuma and Toshio Suzuki they founded Studio Ghibli on the 15^th of June, 1958, in Koganei, Tokyo, Japan. Miyazaki chose the name after a World War I war aircraft (the Caproni Ca.309), nicknamed “the Ghibli”, a hot and dry wind from the Sahara. With the only exception of Lupin Sansei: Cagliostro no Shiro, all the movie scores for Ghibli and pre-Ghibli films have also been masterfully composed and performed by Joe Hisaishi, adding even more charm to the already rich mixture.

 

Before the foundation of Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki had already participated in the creation of big classics like Taiyou no Ouji: Horus no Daibouken (1968), Alps no Shoujo Heidi (1974), Meitantei Homuzu (1984), Haha wo Tazunete Sanzenri (1976), Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (1984) and Lupin Sansei: Cagliostro no Shiro (released in 1979, nominated for the Saturn Award 1981 as Best International Film by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, USA; winner of the Ofuji Noburo Award by Mainichi Film Concours in 1980). He married a fellow cartoonist, Akemi Ôta, and they have two children: Gorō Miyazaki (who, following his father’s steps as a filmmaker, directed Gedo Senki in 2006 and Kokuriko-Zaka Kara in 2011) and Keisuke Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli’s signature icon is Totoro, the fantastic character from Tonari no Totoro (1988), one of their most emblematic movies and also one we can easily deduce that mirrors a great deal of Miyazaki’s feelings in relation to his mother’s enduring illness. So far, Studio Ghibli has produced more than 20 major animated films.

 

He doesn’t like to be called the “Japanese Walt Disney”. He says Disney was a producer, not a director. “Disney is such a big company, they’re very keen to have everything in the world!”, he laughs. Disney speaks in a very different language to the audience: heroes win and get the honor and the girls; heroines win and get their autonomy and also the boys; baddies are badly punished, and in the end the world is a better, cleaner, more prosperous and perfect place.

That’s not what happens in Ghibli’s films: there’s uncertainty, defencelessness, fear of death and death itself. There’s no “and they lived happily ever after”, but “and they lived. And life was good at times, and sometimes it wasn’t”. Ghibli’s movies are not based on fairy tales that portray mighty messages – they are the inner subtelty of the space that exists between dreams and hopes and anticipation; they are living your own days, your own fantasies to the fullest, even if you’re feeling insecure about your future, your family’s well-being, or about whether you will thrive and succeed in life. Ghibli is not Disney; Ghibli is not like anything else in the anime and film industry… Ghibli is a little child that relies on dreaming so as not to lose innocence too soon, a child that longs to fly, to grow up and live and love and rise, high above the peril, high above the underlying dark horrors of war.

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Sources:

• http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0594503/bio
• http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Hayao_Miyazaki.aspx
• http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2006-Le-Ra/Miyazaki-Hayao.html
• http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/miyazaki/miyazaki_biography.txt
• http://www.nndb.com/people/940/000059763/
• http://www.angelfire.com/anime/NVOW/Interview1.html
• http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/M-R/Miyazaki-Hayao-1941.html
• http://bit.ly/2aMuBjU

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