Hayao Miyazaki: The Man Behind the Magic

By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled

There is a word in Japanese — shokunin — that I have used in other articles on this blog. It means craftsman: specifically, the kind of craftsman who has devoted a lifetime to a single skill, who measures quality by standards invisible to the untrained eye, who finds in the endless refinement of technique a form of meaning that other people find in relationships or philosophy or religion.

Hayao Miyazaki is a shokunin.

This sounds like a simple compliment. It is more than a compliment. The shokunin tradition carries specific implications: the willingness to sacrifice ease for quality, the refusal to accept work that falls short of an internal standard that cannot be compromised, the understanding that the craft itself — the making, not the made — is the primary experience. The finished film is the evidence. The making is the life.

Miyazaki has made twelve feature films over a career spanning more than fifty years. Each one was produced with a degree of personal involvement — in the story, in the storyboard, in the animation, in the sound, in the final edit — that is unusual even by the standards of director-driven filmmaking. He is, in the most precise sense of the word, an auteur: an artist whose personal vision is so completely present in the finished work that the work is not separable from the person.

I want to tell you about that person. About where he came from, what he believes, what he has made, and why it matters — not just as entertainment, not just as animation, but as a body of work that has changed the way millions of people see the world.

The Beginning: Postwar Japan and a Boy Who Drew

Hayao Miyazaki was born on January 5, 1941, in Bunkyo, Tokyo. He was four years old when World War Two ended and Japan began its extraordinary transformation from devastated imperial power to pacifist democracy to economic giant.

This historical context is not incidental to understanding his work. Miyazaki grew up in a Japan that was simultaneously rebuilding itself physically — the bombed cities, the ruined economy — and rebuilding itself ideologically, constructing a new national identity out of the wreckage of the old one. The questions of what Japan was, what it had done, and what it should become were not abstract questions for the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. They were the questions that structured daily life.

Miyazaki’s father ran an airplane parts factory — a detail that appears, transformed, throughout his son’s films. Flight, aircraft, the romance and danger of machines that move through air, are among the most consistent visual preoccupations in Miyazaki’s work. Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, The Wind Rises — the sky is never simply a backdrop in Miyazaki. It is a space of possibility, of freedom, of danger, of longing.

The young Miyazaki was a reader and a drawer. He encountered the manga of Osamu Tezuka — as every Japanese child of his generation did — and was marked by it. He encountered the early Disney animations that were being distributed in postwar Japan, and was marked by those too. But the influence that would shape his specific aesthetic most directly was not from animation. It was from illustration: the detailed, painterly, naturalistic illustration of European picture books and adventure stories, the work of artists who understood that a drawn world could be as specific and as real as a photographed one.

This painterly specificity — the sense that every surface in a Miyazaki film has texture, that every space has been inhabited, that every object has a history — is one of the most immediately recognizable qualities of his work. It comes from an artist who was trained as much by looking at illustration as by studying animation, who understood that the goal was not to produce movement but to produce a world.

The Road to Ghibli: Twenty Years of Preparation

Miyazaki did not begin his career as a director. He began it, in 1963, as an in-between animator at Toei Animation — the studio that produced Japan’s earliest theatrical animation features and that served as the training ground for virtually an entire generation of Japanese animation talent.

The work of an in-between animator is the work of rendering the movement between keyframes — the frames that define a character’s position at specific moments — into the smooth continuous motion that makes animation appear fluid. It is painstaking, repetitive, and invisible when done correctly. Miyazaki was very good at it. He was also, from the beginning, impatient with the limitations it placed on his creative involvement.

Over the following decade and a half, Miyazaki worked at several studios, gradually taking on more creative responsibility — as an animator, as a scene designer, as a layout artist, as an episode director for television series. He collaborated extensively with Isao Takahata, who would become his creative partner at Studio Ghibli and who was already, in the 1970s, one of the most formally ambitious directors in Japanese animation.

The television series Future Boy Conan (1978) was Miyazaki’s first work as a series director, and it contains in embryonic form essentially every theme and visual motif that his subsequent career would develop. The post-apocalyptic setting with pockets of surviving nature. The competent, courageous young female protagonist. The flight sequences. The machines that are simultaneously dangerous and beautiful. The specific quality of afternoon light on a landscape.

Conan is not widely known outside Japan. It is, for anyone who wants to understand where Miyazaki came from, essential viewing.

The theatrical film The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) — Miyazaki’s theatrical directorial debut, an adaptation of the Lupin III franchise — demonstrated that his visual ambition could be sustained across feature length. The chase sequences in Cagliostro are still cited by filmmakers — including John Lasseter of Pixar, who has described the film as a formative influence — as among the most inventively choreographed action sequences in animation history.

But it was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) — adapted from Miyazaki’s own manga series, produced at Topcraft rather than at a permanent studio — that established what Miyazaki’s work would be at its fullest expression.

Nausicaä: The Film That Made Ghibli Possible

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set a thousand years after an ecological catastrophe has covered much of the earth in a toxic fungal forest called the Sea of Corruption. The princess of a small valley kingdom — Nausicaä — navigates the politics of warring human factions while pursuing a private understanding of the Sea of Corruption that contradicts the received wisdom of her society.

The film is an environmental fable, a war film, a coming-of-age story, and a philosophical argument about the relationship between humanity and the natural world — all conducted simultaneously, across 116 minutes of animation that was produced under significant time and budget pressure.

What Nausicaä demonstrated — and this is what made it the foundation of everything that followed — is that animation could carry genuine thematic weight without sacrificing visual beauty or emotional engagement. The film does not simplify its argument. The Sea of Corruption is not straightforwardly evil; it is, ultimately, a purification mechanism, a response to human damage that has its own internal logic. The human factions that Nausicaä moves between are not simply good and evil; they are people with coherent, competing values, making decisions that are understandable given their situations.

This moral complexity — the refusal to divide the world into heroes and villains in the simple sense — became a defining characteristic of Miyazaki’s work. It is one of the qualities that distinguishes his films from most animated entertainment and that makes them more interesting to adult viewers than most films marketed to children.

The commercial success of Nausicaä provided the foundation for Studio Ghibli’s founding in 1985, established with Miyazaki, Takahata, and producer Toshio Suzuki. The studio’s stated intention was simple and ambitious: to produce theatrical animated films of the highest possible quality, on a sustainable basis, without compromising the creative vision of the filmmakers.

The Ghibli Films: A Career in Twelve Works

I want to go through Miyazaki’s Ghibli-era features in some detail, because the career is not a flat line — it develops, it deepens, it surprises, and understanding the arc illuminates what each individual film is doing.

Castle in the Sky (1986)

The first Ghibli production, and in some ways the most purely fun. A flying castle, a girl with a magical amulet, pirates, government agents, a boy who works in a mine. The adventure story elements are deployed with enormous skill and genuine excitement. Castle in the Sky is the film Miyazaki makes when he allows himself the uncomplicated pleasure of adventure storytelling, and the pleasure is contagious.

The film also contains the first fully developed version of Miyazaki’s ambivalence about technology and power — the flying castle is both magnificent and dangerous, and the question of what happens when extraordinary power is combined with the wrong intentions is the film’s central anxiety.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

My Neighbor Totoro was produced as a double feature with Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies — the two films sharing a theatrical release as a kind of diptych of childhood in different registers. Where Grave of the Fireflies is the darkest film about childhood in Japanese cinema, My Neighbor Totoro is among the warmest.

Two sisters move to the countryside with their father while their mother recovers from illness in a nearby hospital. They encounter Totoro — a large, benevolent forest spirit — and several smaller spirits. Nothing dramatically terrible happens. The film’s tension comes from the ordinary anxieties of childhood: the fear that something might happen to a sick parent, the responsibility of looking after a younger sibling, the loneliness of being new somewhere.

My Neighbor Totoro is the film that most purely expresses Miyazaki’s love of the Japanese countryside — the rice fields, the old farmhouses, the camphor trees, the specific quality of summer light in rural Saitama in the 1950s. I have written about this in my article on Ghibli films and real Japan. The landscape of Totoro is not invented. It is observed, with extraordinary precision, and rendered in animation.

The film was not a commercial success on initial release. It has become, in the decades since, the most beloved of all Ghibli films in Japan — the one whose central image, Totoro standing at a bus stop with Satsuki and Mei, is recognized by virtually every Japanese person alive.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

A thirteen-year-old witch leaves home for a year of solo living in a new city, as required by tradition, and establishes a delivery service using her broomstick. The film is about the experience of being young and competent but not yet fully formed — of having real ability and real independence and the specific uncertainty that accompanies both.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is the most internally focused of Miyazaki’s films — the dramatic stakes are entirely internal, the question the film is asking entirely personal. What happens when your ability temporarily deserts you? What does it mean to find your confidence again, and where does confidence actually come from? The answers the film proposes are specific and earned and not simple.

The European city setting — modeled on several real European cities, particularly Stockholm — is one of the most beautifully realized environments in Miyazaki’s work. Every street has been thought about. Every building has been considered. The city is a character.

Porco Rosso (1992)

A former Italian air force pilot, cursed to appear as an anthropomorphic pig, works as a freelance bounty hunter in the Adriatic Sea of the 1930s. Porco Rosso is the most personal of Miyazaki’s films — the one that most directly addresses his own anxieties about masculinity, about war, about what it means to be an adult man in a world that has been damaged by the choices of adult men.

The pig curse is never explained. It is not meant to be explained. It is the externalization of something internal — a self-imposed judgment, a refusal of a specific kind of human belonging. The film is, at its core, about a man who has decided he does not deserve to be fully human, and about the people around him who believe otherwise.

Porco Rosso is not Miyazaki’s most accessible film. It is, for viewers who meet it where it is, one of his most rewarding.

Princess Mononoke (1997)

The film that broke the boundaries of what Japanese animation was considered capable of doing commercially and thematically. Princess Mononoke is set in the late Muromachi period — roughly the 15th century — and concerns the conflict between a forest community of animal gods and the human industrial settlement that is destroying their forest to mine iron.

The film’s specific achievement is its absolute refusal to assign moral simplicity to any of its factions. The humans of the iron town are not villains — they are people with legitimate needs, building something real, under the leadership of Lady Eboshi who is, in many respects, the most admirable character in the film. The animal gods are not simply innocent victims — they are capable of destruction and rage that is terrifying. The protagonist, Ashitaka, can see the good in all parties. This seeing does not resolve the conflict. The conflict is not resolvable through seeing alone.

Princess Mononoke became the highest-grossing film in Japanese box office history at the time of its release, a record it held until Spirited Away surpassed it four years later. It was the first Ghibli film to receive wide international theatrical distribution.

Spirited Away (2001)

The film that most people mean when they say “Ghibli” outside Japan.

Ten-year-old Chihiro and her parents, moving to a new town, take a wrong turn and enter the spirit world. Her parents are transformed into pigs by the witch Yubaba, who runs a bathhouse for spirits and gods. Chihiro must find work in the bathhouse, survive its politics, and find a way to save her parents and return to the human world.

Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 — the first non-English-language animated film to win the award outright. It was, at the time of its release, the highest-grossing film in Japanese box office history, surpassing Princess Mononoke. It has since been surpassed but remains one of the highest-grossing Japanese films of all time.

What Spirited Away does that no description fully captures is create a world that feels simultaneously strange and internally consistent — a spirit world with its own logic, its own economy, its own social hierarchy, its own geography. The bathhouse is a specific place. The rules of how it works are never fully explained but are always felt. Chihiro’s navigation of this world — the gradual accumulation of knowledge about how things work, the building of relationships with specific people in specific roles, the slow discovery of her own competence — is one of the most satisfying protagonist arcs in Miyazaki’s work precisely because it is so grounded in practical reality. Chihiro does not find magic powers. She finds a job, does it well, and builds from there.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

An adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel, the most overtly anti-war of Miyazaki’s films. A young woman is cursed to appear as an old woman and takes shelter in the moving castle of the wizard Howl. The film’s setting — a vaguely Edwardian European fantasy world in the middle of a war — allows Miyazaki to address the experience of living in a society at war directly and unflinchingly.

Howl’s Moving Castle is the most visually elaborate of Miyazaki’s films — the castle itself, a mechanical monstrosity that walks on legs and accumulates additions over time, is one of the most inventive environmental designs in his career.

Ponyo (2008)

The simplest and most purely joyful of Miyazaki’s late films — a conscious decision to make something that very young children could fully access, with the formal ambition of a master working in a deliberately reduced register. A goldfish-girl wants to become human. A five-year-old boy wants her to stay. The sea is involved in various catastrophic ways.

The animation of Ponyo — hand-drawn, deliberately reminiscent of children’s book illustration, with water rendered in a gestural, expressive style unlike anything in Miyazaki’s previous work — is one of the most distinctive visual achievements in his career.

The Wind Rises (2013)

The film that Miyazaki announced would be his last — an announcement he subsequently retracted — is his most personal and most complex. It is a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the Zero fighter aircraft used by Japan in World War Two.

The film does not ignore what the Zero was used for. It does not pretend that beautiful engineering has no moral dimension. But it also refuses to condemn Horikoshi for the application his work was put to — for the gap between what an engineer creates and what the world does with the creation. The film is, at its heart, a meditation on the relationship between creative passion and moral responsibility, between the beauty of the made thing and the cost of making it.

The Wind Rises is not a comfortable film. It is, I think, the most honest film Miyazaki has made about the Japan that produced him — the Japan of the 1930s and 1940s, of the war and what led to it — and the honesty is earned through the directness with which it refuses to simplify what was not simple.

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

After a decade of announced retirement, Miyazaki returned at eighty-two with a film that is, in some respects, his most enigmatic and, in others, his most nakedly autobiographical. A boy mourning his mother is led by a grey heron into an alternate world where the past and present overlap.

The Boy and the Heron won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2024 — Miyazaki’s second Oscar, the first being Spirited Away twenty-one years earlier. The film is stranger and more personal than his previous work, less interested in accessibility and more interested in saying something specific about what it means to be an old man who has spent a lifetime making worlds.

The Philosophy: What Miyazaki Believes

Miyazaki’s films are not politically neutral. He holds specific views about specific things, and those views appear in the films in ways that are not always subtle.

He is a pacifist — not in the abstract sense of preferring peace to war, but in the specific, historically grounded sense of someone who grew up in the shadow of Japan’s wartime experience and who has spent a lifetime thinking about what that experience means and what lessons it requires. Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises are all, in different ways, anti-war films. The violence in them is never glamorized. The costs are always present.

He is an environmentalist — again, not in the abstract sense but in the specific sense of someone who loves the physical world and is genuinely angry about its destruction. The satoyama landscape of My Neighbor Totoro, the toxic forest of Nausicaä, the ancient forest of Princess Mononoke — these are not just settings. They are arguments. The argument is that the natural world has value independent of its utility to humans, and that the destruction of that world is not merely a practical problem but a moral one.

He is a feminist — not a programmatic one, but a consistent one. The protagonists of his films are, more often than not, young women or girls. They are competent, courageous, and not defined primarily by their relationships with male characters. The world of Ghibli is populated by women who act, who lead, who make decisions that matter. This was not common in animated entertainment when Miyazaki began making films, and it is still not as common as it should be.

He is a humanist in the old sense — someone who believes in the capacity of human beings to be better than their circumstances, who finds in ordinary people engaged in ordinary work a kind of dignity that deserves acknowledgment and representation. The bathhouse workers of Spirited Away, the coal dusters of My Neighbor Totoro, the aviation engineers of The Wind Rises — these are people doing real work, and the work is treated with respect.

The Legacy: What Miyazaki Made Possible

I want to be specific about what Miyazaki’s career has made possible — not just for animation, but for the broader understanding of what animation can be.

Before Miyazaki’s commercial and critical success — particularly the international reception of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away — animation was widely understood in most of the world as a medium for children. Not because animation had not produced serious work before — it had — but because the serious work had not found the audience that would force a revision of the default assumption.

Spirited Away winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature — and being widely recognized as one of the best films of 2002 in any medium — forced a revision of the default assumption. If this film could do what it does, then the category of animation was larger than previously understood. What other films had been dismissed or underdiscovered because of the assumption that animation was not serious?

This revision was not immediate and it is not complete. The prejudice against animation as a serious medium persists. But it is less complete than it was before Miyazaki’s international success, and that difference is not small.

Within Japan, the legacy is different and in some ways more interesting. Miyazaki’s films established a standard for Japanese theatrical animation that has shaped the aspirations of every Japanese animation studio that followed. The commitment to hand-drawn animation at a time when digital methods were becoming standard, the insistence on visual quality that does not compromise for budget or schedule, the willingness to make films that engage with serious themes for audiences of all ages — these commitments, demonstrated across forty years and twelve features, constitute a professional standard that the industry has to reckon with whether or not it can match it.

A Personal Note

I have watched Miyazaki’s films many times. The first time I watched My Neighbor Totoro as an adult — after having seen it as a child, after having shown it to my own children — I noticed something I had not noticed before.

The bus stop scene. Satsuki and Mei waiting in the rain for their father. Totoro appearing beside them. The specific quality of the rain, the darkness, the lit bus stop in the rural night.

I have stood at bus stops like that. I have waited in that kind of rain. The scene is not a fantasy bus stop. It is a real bus stop in rural Japan, observed precisely, rendered in animation. And Totoro standing there, as natural as anything, as present as the rain — this is what the film is doing. Making the world we actually live in available to magic. Showing that the bus stops we walk past every day might contain things we have not yet learned to see.

That is what Miyazaki does. Across twelve films, across fifty years of work, across every frame of every sequence he has labored over with the attention of a shokunin — he makes the world available to wonder.

This is not a small thing to do. It is, I would argue, one of the most important things that art can do.

He has done it twelve times. He may do it again.

I will be watching.

— Yoshi 🌳 Central Japan, 2026

Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Why Ghibli Films Hit Differently When You Actually Live in Japan” and “The History of Anime: From Astro Boy to Global Phenomenon” — both available on Japan Unveiled.