Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art

"Miyazaki World: A Life in Art is partly a biography and partly an analysis of Director Hayao Miyazaki’s eleven films. I also include a chapter on his manga work. I looked at everything written about Miyazaki, met with many of the people who worked with him and interviewed Miyazaki myself. This gave me a chance to see this amazing auteur from the inside out. Miyazaki really merits being seen as an auteur—one of the greatest directors like Kurosawa, Truffaut—in the sense that he has such a strong stamp on his movies: the themes, the imagery, the music. Miyazaki had a vision that he expressed in many fascinating, heartbreaking and always beautiful ways throughout his career. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He is probably the most beloved animator in the world. By writing a biography, I wanted to illuminate not only what is so special about his films (and why), but also show how his life (and the life of Japan during the turbulent twentieth century) has influenced (and been expressed through) his films. The most exciting part for me was getting to know him as an individual, then learning about his childhood during World War Two, his growing up in occupied Japan and the sixties revolutions. We can see how all this is expressed in his brilliant movies. Absolutely. You cannot understand Japanese people, especially those of Miyazaki’s age, without understanding how huge a shadow the war cast on them. Miyazaki talks the terrible traumatic memory of fleeing a conflagration in his family car and how his family had to turn away others to escape the neighborhood that was burning down around them. To me this seems to be the ordinary event in Miyazaki’s life. “You cannot understand Japanese people, especially those of Miyazaki’s age, without understanding how huge a shadow the war cast on them.” To some extent, the many apocalyptic moments are in some ways cathartic re-workings of the bombing of Japan and the tremendous waste and destruction afterwards. I also think in his films he is processing personal trauma. When he was a young boy, his mother came down with tuberculosis which was then almost always fatal. His mother was bedridden for eight or nine years of his early childhood. A lot of his work deals with national trauma and individual trauma and also the trouble of living in the twentieth and twenty-first century. They are not happily-ever-after films. Miyazaki’s world has distinctly dark moments. We tend to think of animation as fun and lighthearted. In Miyazaki’s movies there are many fun, lighthearted and magical moments. But he tends to deal more with the elegiac, loss and ruination on an individual and also on a civilizational level. Many of his films contain beautiful scenes of ruins. Here he taps into something that is not just particular to Japan, where the countryside has become so urbanized. So much of the modern world feels a sense of loss. To help us with that sense of loss, Miyazaki provides magical moments of beauty and joy. He also provides visions of resilience—children who deal with challenges from the loss of a parent in Spirited Away to the tsunami in Ponyo . These kids show us all how to deal with things; not with magic, by being alert, sensible, welcoming of change and persistent in muddling through a confusing world. His visions of resilience are so beautifully done that they inspire and give us hope."