Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao Miyazakiis a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter, animator, author, and manga artist. Through a career that has spanned five decades, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker of anime feature films and, along with Isao Takahata, co-founded Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth5 January 1941
CityTokyo, Japan
CountryJapan
The characters are born from repetition, from repeatedly thinking about them. I have their outline in my head. I become the character and as the character I visit the locations of the story many, many times. Only after that I start drawing the character, but again I do it many, many times, over and over. And I only finish just before the deadline.
I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. I never know where the story will go but I just keeping working on the film as it develops. It's a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that's the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it.
The 21st century is a complex and unforeseeable epoch. Our thinking habits and our values, which until now looked settled, are being challenged.
I never read reviews. I'm not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators.
I think Tokyo is going to sink under water soon. All those stupid high-rise buildings will sink and maybe all the traffic will be gone. And everything will be peaceful and quiet.
Watching John Lasseter's films, I think I can understand better than anyone that what he's doing, is going straight ahead with his vision and working really hard to get that vision into film form. And I feel that my understanding this of him is my friendship towards him.
It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes, that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me.
Sometimes I test myself saying, 'If I get a death sentence if I don't make this movie, would I still make this movie?'
I can't do a film after having debated it. I am unable to do a film while discussing it with my team. I issue directives. I do not achieve it otherwise.
But it is far too late for me to try it.
Characters are pictured very simply in Moebius' drawings, yet they have a sort of atmosphere around them. And the characters themselves exhale all kinds of things, notably solitude and a great nobleness. For me, it is the greatest quality of Moebius' drawings.
I myself become terrified of death when I am in a negative state of mind. But the thought of death ceases to bother me once I become productive.
Nobody has the right to sit in judgment and decide what's good or bad for you.
The love of weaponry is often a manifestation of infantile traits in an adult.