This article was originally published on March 8, 2024. At the 2024 Oscars, The Boy and the Heron won the award for Best Animated Feature.
No living animator is as widely heroized by his peers as Hayao Miyazaki is. When you ask animation directors about the effect his work has had on them, the same words recur over and over again: inspiration, master, North Star, blows my mind. Tomm Moore, director of Wolfwalkers, met Miyazaki at the Oscars’ 2014 Governors Awards and confesses to spontaneously devising a ruse to get near the director: “I told his translator that I borrowed a cigarette just to hang out with him a bit,†Moore, who doesn’t smoke, says. “He was amused by that. He just passed me the ashtray with a cheeky grin.â€
Nearly a decade after that night when Miyazaki, now 83, earned the Academy’s Honorary Award for a lifetime of animation achievements, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli is still hard at work. The box-office topping American release of The Boy and the Heron was the latest chapter of a 60-year-long career in animation. In that time, animators around the world have obsessively studied the work of an artist whose 12 feature films and numerous TV series aren’t just heartfelt stories but technical marvels. He’s also a useful model in part because of how personal his films are. “Most animation is made much more by committee,†explains Moore, who co-founded his own independent animation studio Cartoon Saloon. Miyazaki, he says, is an exception: “He has a team working with him, but they are following him as an auteur. He makes these elaborate beautiful spectacles, but they still seem like they all just came from the tip of his pencil.â€
Just as Miyazaki’s films were influenced by artists as diverse as fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin, French animator Paul Grimault, Japanese director Taiji Yabushita, and his late Studio Ghibli colleague and mentor Isao Takahata, generations of animators around the world have taken lessons from him and applied it to their works. Vulture spoke with 15 animators — directors, storyboard artists, character designers, and more — who laid out what they’ve learned.
Lana saves Conan, and Conan saves Lana
Future Boy Conan (1978)
Rebecca Sugar (director, Steven Universe): I’ve been shouting from the rooftops about Future Boy Conan since I first saw it in 2009. The whole show was a giant reference for Steven Universe. We didn’t work from scripts on Steven Universe, we worked from storyboards, and so much of Future Boy Conan is just visual storytelling. In episode eight, Conan is trapped underwater and about to drown, and Lana is going back and forth between the ocean floor and the surface, bringing him air. She starts to drown, and Conan has to save her.
The animation timing is incredible. Conan clenches his face, he gets his shackles off, he throws them off his feet. He gets to Lana, and he rockets up. Once they get to the top of the water, they shoot out meters and meters into the air. I don’t know if there’s ever been any other sequence like that in anything. My now-husband, the animator Ian Jones-Quartey and I, when we watched this back in our little apartment in Brooklyn, we shot to our feet and cheered. It’s so heightened. You want so badly for them to survive and be free.
Miyazaki talks often about wanting to imbue the series with an optimism that wasn’t in the book Future Boy Conan was based on, which is very much about nuclear war. Since this was going to be something that kids would see, he put in all of this beauty and love and excitement and hopefulness. It’s very dark anyway, but that sequence perfectly encapsulates the optimism and determination and calmness Conan has.
Extraordinary feats of strength and heightened emotional sequences like this one are things Miyazaki’s pointed out that could only be done in animation, and were a giant inspiration for us. There’s a little psychic communication between Conan and Lana, but other than that, it’s wordless. That could only be driven by the storyboards and by the animators. Every little motion and line goes toward telling that story — every little hatch on his cheeks as he strains his face, every mark on his arms as he’s struggling and flexing to get free. There’s so much love in those drawings. It’s staggering.
Throughout Steven Universe, our characters Steven and Connie were very Conan- and Lana-inspired. These kids live in this post-apocalyptic future full of adults with this incredible baggage from a war that the kids didn’t experience. We wanted to evoke the way that Conan and Lana love each other so unconditionally. They are just trying to figure out how to navigate this broken world, and always thinking of each other and their family members first, even if their family members are broken by experiences they can’t fully understand. These action sequences are driven by that unconditional love.
Lupin III defies physics in a Citroën
The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Jorge R. Gutierrez (director, The Book of Life, Maya and the Three): I found Miyazaki at CalArts. Every night, people would show movies. The first one I saw was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and it blew me away. And then in class, as an example of masterful editing, they showed the car chase sequence from The Castle of Cagliostro, which came five years before Nausicaä. And I remember just going like: “The guy who did that beautiful, poetic film did this?!†It was like finding out Sergio Leone had helped direct the Ben-Hur chariot race. It all kind of made sense. It was one of those moments where you could see your hero evolving.
Lupin III dogfights a plane that makes atomic bombs
“Wings of Death: Albatross,†Lupin III Part II (1980)
Genndy Tartakovksy (director, Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory, Primal): In Japan, in anime, the director does the storyboard, usually. That’s much rarer in American TV where there’s a team of storyboard artists. When you have a director doing all the boards for their episodes, you get their point of view, you get a specificness. There’s something very — I don’t know if it’s romantic? But being an animation nerd, it’s like, yeah, you want to do the boards. The later in my years I get, the more I board. On Primal, I’ve done seven out of ten episodes for pretty much every season, and I’m really proud of that. It gives the storytelling that more personal touch. It’s you.
When you look at Miyazaki’s boards for something like the episode “Wings of Death: Albatross,†you see he never cheats. Because he can draw so well, he’ll put a lot of stuff on the board. In anime production, you start with the board and then it goes to layout, and the animators get most of the information from the board. So when the scene’s got a lot of stuff in it, it makes the episodes better. They feel richer. When you look at other episodes not directed by him, they feel a little emptier.
We used to look at this even back in the early Dexter’s Laboratory days: how to make things look really cool, even when the production is limited. This scale, the jumping, getting to the plane — it’s really action-comedy. It’s not one-liners, it’s more about the physicality of it, which always appealed to and influenced me. You see it from Tex Avery through all of Miyazaki’s stuff as well.
I was 24, 25, and I was trying to figure it all out. I would look at this sequence and think, How did he make this feel so dense? And it really is the storyboarding. Because it’s still done on a TV budget. Everything’s very controlled, and you spend the money where you need to spend the money. The animation is not feature quality, but it’s just very specific and neat, because the compositions are great. The choreography is great. Everything is very clear, and it’s staged very simply because it has to be production friendly.
There’s this one shot where Lupin is coming around the big plane, and it’s just a pan, but it just feels really great and very simple. Super clear action. You know where to look. Nowadays with CG, you can do anything, and somehow it’s still not as cool as that.
Nausicaä flies, fights, and meets Teto the fox squirrel
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Vicky Jenson (director, Shrek, Spellbound): Nausicaä was so cool, so independent in the way she flew. In Disney animated films, by contrast, they want to show acting and bouncy animation. Everything’s more driven, almost, by an idea of what’s “worth†animating. But with these films, the storytelling can be handled with the simplicity of beautiful, strong composition. Maybe one thing is animated in a certain shot — like in the flying sequences, her sleeve and her hair. But everything else might be still, and the clouds are moving underneath. It’s such wonderful restraint. I love when you see the shadow on the clouds. I’ve swiped it. It’s in Spellbound, too, which I’m working on now. The shadow under her moves over the tops of the clouds really fast. And then the whole cloud moves, and the shadow drapes to the ground, and you get this amazing sense of depth and scale.
I can’t really speak as an animator, because I’m not an animator. I started off as a visual artist, got into background design, then got into storyboard, and then production design. If you start with a composition strong enough that it reads as well as on a postage stamp as it does on a billboard, it can convey the story without anything moving. Then you add some movement to it, and suddenly it’s on another level. I was really struck by that kind of clarity of visual storytelling. Nausicaä was where I first noticed it.
Tom Sito (animator, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Lion King): One of the things I’ve always admired was Miyazaki’s great ability to present contrast. On Nausicaä’s little glider, flying in front of these enormous crawling bugs, you get a sense of scale between her and those big insects. And you’ve got to remember, this is all hand drawn. There’s no machinery, there’s no motion capture, there’s no rotoscope, there’s no mechanical devices to make it easy. It’s all by eye. Perspective is a hard thing to draw freehand — understanding the movements of large shapes as opposed to tiny shapes, because not only are they drawn differently, but they move differently.
In order to make that work, particularly by eye, without using any kind of mechanical reference, you have to understand natural science. He’s basing the Ohm on a particular type of insect, like a grub or a ground insect, a caterpillar, with how the legs and the segmented pieces fluctuate as they move. And Miyazaki has had a lifelong love of aeronautics. His father was an aircraft designer, and he has a fascination with how airplanes move. So studying how that glider would bank and dart around these gigantic creatures — he has that in his quiver to refer to. That’s doing your research. We have a phrase in Hollywood: “Only God creates from nothing, the rest of us do research.â€
Defending Dad
Genndy Tartakovsky: This is not a big action scene or sequence. It’s a fight. Nausicaä comes home, sees her father in trouble, and she starts fighting these knights. The timing is super badass and very tight. It’s got this coolness to it. I talk about that a lot, the “feeling†when you watch something that’s really good — live-action, animation, doesn’t matter. I judge how good it is by that. Goddamn, that’s a cool fight — that’s a feeling.
Meeting the fox squirrel
Vicky Jenson: In this scene, Lord Yupa brings Nausicaä a little “fox squirrel.†It looks like a little Pikachu, a raccoon-like thing. He keeps warning her that even the babies are fierce and they’ll bite. And she’s like, “No, I’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.†She puts her hand out, and it jumps onto her and runs onto her shoulder. It’d be like having a rat on your head. But she’s so calm and gentle with it. She puts her finger out to say, “It’s okay.†And of course, it bites her.
She goes, “Mmf.†It’s a very subtle little admission of pain, but she’s patient and waits, and the little thing calms down and finally lets go. And then for me, heaven on earth, it licks her! Like it says, “I’m sorry.†That hit me on a very primal level, seeing the acceptance of a wild animal captured in a movie, and an animated movie! This is not little birds making a dress so she can go to the ball and win her future husband. No. This was just a girl and an animal and a primal connection. And it’s a battle over the health of the planet, which was also forward-thinking. When I worked on FernGully: The Last Rainforest, this movie came up quite a bit, because we were also making an environmental statement. It was great to see a story that could say more than “Wait for your prince.â€
Hell breaks loose on Laputa
Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
Gary Trousdale (director, Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame): Miyazaki’s sequences can be apocalyptic. In Laputa: Castle in the Sky, the castle is taken over by the bad guys, and they loot it and make war on the earth below — the castle falls apart, there are explosions and a huge body count. Those robot guys just drop down as the castle disintegrates. It’s just amazing stuff. All hand drawn, no digital. Broadly speaking, I think Miyazaki’s influence on us at Disney was more about scale. A lot of Disney movies are smaller. I don’t mean that in a bad way; I mean that they’re more intimate in characters and their expressions and their emotion. And Miyazaki was not afraid to pull back and show big things, big set pieces with a lot happening. And that’s the kind of thing that we tried to do in a couple instances, like the molten lead pouring out of Notre Dame Cathedral in Hunchback of Notre Dame or the big stone giants in front of Atlantis in Atlantis: The Lost Empire. We didn’t actually say, “Oh, this is a Miyazaki moment.†But those are the scenes that were inspired by his sense of scale and grandeur.
And as compelling as Miyazaki’s characters are, it’s the flying sequences for me that really work. The flying pirate ship in Laputa: Castle in the Sky has all the stuff that makes it home: the hanging sausages, the laundry, a guy shoveling coal, the little skiffs! They can just drop off and zoom away, about 15, 20 feet above the ground. Those things just zip by. He makes them super dynamic, super exciting, and a lot of times from their point of view.
Pazu and Sheeta fly through a storm to find Laputa
Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
Gary Trousdale: Then in other moments, things calm down, like when Pazu and Sheeta fly through the storm, it’s some of the most beautiful filmmaking. The storm passes, and they’re out cold, drifting with their shadow against the clouds. You get that whole sense of scale. They’re tiny compared to these huge cumulus clouds, and they just kind of bump into the castle. That’s a really cool way of revealing something so grand after such a tumultuous journey. It’s peaceful. It’s bump! Then they’re on a lawn with butterflies and flowers. And then a giant robot comes in.
Mei plays and follows the Totoros
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Brenda Chapman (director, Brave, The Prince of Egypt): Mei’s big sister Satsuki goes to school, and she’s left at home with her dad. She’s bugging him, leaving flowers on his desk, and he’s trying to work. She goes off and sees one of the little sprites, the Mini Totoro, and follows it. I grew up in a really small town, always outside in nature, and I would just squat on the ground and stare at the ladybugs on a tree. When she’s squatting and looking under the house knowing it’s there, and then it sneaks out behind her and she runs, those memories wash over me. Animated films are so frenetic now. They’re all snappy dialogue, quick, constant dah, dah, dah, dah. These moments of quiet and focus on what a character is feeling and thinking are what Miyazaki does beautifully in all of his films, but in Totoro especially.
Mei goes through the tunnel, deep into the world of pure heart and fantasy imagination, finds the giant Totoro, and has no fear — just crawls up on him and then takes a nap, falls asleep, and then wakes up back home. That’s stuck with me all these years. To be able to capture that in Mei, obviously Miyazaki pulled from a feeling he must have had as a child.
I remember seeing Totoro in the ’80s. I was still at CalArts. I went back to work on my final film there, and I just took a different approach. I stopped trying to make gag films like everybody else in my class, and I created a story about an old woman who was alone on her birthday. I was around a lot of old people growing up, so when a child would show up, they’d just be so needy of that child’s attention. I created this character and it got me hired at Disney. It reinforces that you should go for things that are familiar to you, that you feel deep inside. Prince of Egypt was not my choice of subject matter, but I did have to go in like, Okay, what is it that is going to speak to me to make this film? And it’s the relationship between the two brothers. It’s not just this big religious epic. With Brave, it was the relationship with my daughter and what it felt like to be a mother with a precocious child. Find something that grabs the audience and grounds them to an emotional connection.
The sun sets on Satsuki’s search for Mei
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Gary Trousdale: Miyazaki is very, very focused on detail. Back in my Disney days, we were shown Totoro and the sequence when they were looking for Mei, who had gone missing. The progression of the light in the scenes — the shadows were getting darker and deeper and a little bit longer, and the light in the sky was subtly changing — is done so artfully. When they finally find her, it’s magic hour and she’s in the Catbus. Something totally frantic has gone on — the searching for a missing child — but you’re looking at the background, and the art, the painting.
Peter Ramsey (director, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Rise of the Guardians): Totoro connected with me immediately. It was warm, comforting, and the picture of that world was so clear. It had a lot to do with the lighting, the color palette — particularly in the evening sequence, where day is transitioning into night, a sequence everybody is entranced by. It’s perfect. It’s like Miyazaki went there and drew this, and came back and is just showing it to you. I can’t overstate enough the feeling that I knew this place somehow.
Here’s another thing that I don’t know how anybody could ever do consciously, but I was thinking of My Neighbor Totoro: On the first movie that I directed, Rise of the Guardians, I ridiculously told myself that part of my wish was that somebody would see it years later, and that it would make them think of something they saw in their childhood and couldn’t quite remember. Because that’s how I felt watching Totoro. I was like, I know this. I’ve felt this. I’ve been here.
Vicky Jenson: I started as a background painter, and in something like Totoro, the clouds puffing in the sky and the bright sunlight on the trees are beautiful, but it’s an ordinary blue sky, and those are typical green trees. When I was learning to paint and applying what I was learning on things like Ren and Stimpy, I really got the message, Don’t just do an ordinary blue sky. Don’t just do ordinary green grass. Really push it. So I did. But there’s a great purity in the way that Miyazaki’s films handle that kind of daylight that we recognize. I know exactly what kind of summer that is. It’s just something you feel in your bones.
Mei, Satsuki, and Totoro wait for the bus
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Jennifer Yuh Nelson (director, Love, Death + Robots, Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3): If only a Catbus would show up for me at a bus stop. Every time you see an image of Totoro, posters and stuff, it’s that scene of the two girls waiting beside Totoro. That’s because what actually happens is so tactile and understated. They stand next to each other, there’s a drop of water on his umbrella. His whiskers move a little bit, and his eyes widen. It’s so subtle, but it captures the wonder of hearing the water and reacting to the sound. Totoro’s putting it together and then he creates this massive downpour on all of them, and the little girls are watching, like: What is going on? What is this thing? I’m a little scared. But at the same time, it’s wonderful — that sense of dreamlike, childlike wonder Miyazaki does so well. And of course, a Catbus shows up.
I love that you see the headlights in the distance and think, It’s the bus. It’s finally here. Finally the little girls will get to see their father. And then the headlights suddenly do this weird blip. It’s not moving like a bus in the distance anymore, and that’s your first clue. Then it starts to bounce and jump.
Once it appears, it’s a Catbus with all these legs, and it’s fuzzy, and the door stretches open in a weird shape like a fur-laden thing. Totoro gives Mei a little gift and then crawls on, and then the cat bursts away. It turns with those big lidded eyes and then runs off over the hills. The headlights are just all over the place because it’s a cat’s head and not a bus. I wanted that Catbus so much when I was a kid. It’s beautiful and simple and genuine and childlike, but it’s animated with perfectly minimalist discipline. Perfect timing, to the frame, to make things the optimal level of accessible and identifiable and funny. It’s seared into our brains.
Tomm Moore (director, Wolfwalkers, Song of the Sea): The bus stop sequence was something I hadn’t seen in animation before, even as a big animation fan in the ’90s when most of it was like musical theater — I think about Aladdin, all these fast-paced, funny songs, and a lot of hyperkinetic pyrotechnics. And then the bus-stop scene in Totoro comes along. It shows you can slow right down and still do something only possible in animation. It’s almost meditative, especially the little scene with the shrine.
This is the thing I always say about when they recreate this stuff in CG, even frame by frame. I always think it’s such a pity because there’s something about the fact that it’s hand-drawn that has a calming effect. The nature of it, how painstakingly carefully the backgrounds are painted and the characters are drawn — there’s some magic in it. When the Catbus arrives, it’s a cool, animation-y type thing, that of course now we could do in CG. There’s plenty of ways to do it. But there’s something about the fact that it’s hand-drawn that makes it super timeless. I think that appeals to kids in its simplicity, but the sophistication is also very appealing to adults. You can see the craft there in front of you. It’s not hidden at all: It’s the timing, it’s the syncopated music by Joe Hisaishi, the raindrops becoming music, and the frog … everything is very calm.
When we made The Secret of Kells, I wasn’t as familiar with his impact. I’d seen some of his movies and the people on staff were talking about them. We were aware of him. I obviously had seen stuff years before, but I think it was coming through more subconsciously. It was an influence that I hadn’t put my finger on. Then for Song of the Sea, which came out five years later, I had a moodboard, and I had The Jungle Book, and I had the Irish live-action film Into the West, and I had My Neighbor Totoro. Those were the touchstones for the movie I had in mind.
Kiki flies away from home
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
Shannon Tindle (director and screenwriter, Ultraman, Kubo and the Two Strings): Miyazaki is constantly telling his animators — and I do the same thing on anything that I’m directing — to put things in that are just everyday details, even mistakes. In Kubo and the Two Strings, there’s a moment animated by Jason Stalman, the sequence where Kubo is cleaning up the cave. In his reference work, Stallman went to grab a piece of paper and it slipped, and he had to grab it again. He put that in the animation. What that does immediately is say: This is not a puppet, this is not animation. This is a real person. Miyazaki does it all the time: In Spirited Away, Chihiro puts her shoes on, tapping the toe on the floor so it hugs the back of her heel. One of my favorite sequences in Kiki’s Delivery Service is just after the opening, when you see the economy with which Miyazaki introduces characters and makes you care about them through mundane details.
Kiki is listening to the radio on the grass. She comes inside through a slat in the fence. That’s not how everybody else gets into the house, but that’s how Kiki gets into the house. Then she has a conversation any 13-year-old would have with her mother, but her mother is making potions. That’s no big deal. This is the world they live in. Her mother says Kiki doesn’t yet understand how to do potions, and she wants to go off into the world. And then: “Did you borrow your father’s radio again without asking?†That’s Miyazaki grounding the mundane that we all deal with every day.
Soon Kiki’s getting on her broom, and it’s this continuation of the generational argument: Use your mom’s broom, listen to your mom’s advice because you’re not ready yet. Then she flies, and what happens? She bumps into a tree and shoots off. We see that she’s not great at it, and she’s going out into this big world. But the scene says she’s loved. She’s loved by her parents, she’s loved by the old lady, she’s loved by these cheering friends. We hear this really spirited, lovely song. But right in the middle of that magic, a know-it-all witch floats next to her.
Every 30 seconds or less, there’s a moment that grounds this story about a young witch. Why did you take your dad’s radio? Use my broom, not yours. I’m wobbly on my broom. Someone is criticizing me as I’m trying to find my way in the world. It’s such a gentle, thoughtful movie, and in just a few minutes we’ve hinted at all the struggles she’s going to have. But we’re also hinting at the quality of her character and that she, because she’s insistent and hopeful, can overcome it — everything the film is about while keeping its best surprises hidden. That is hard to do.
The bakery’s ‘threat of activation’
Rebecca Sugar: Working on Steven Universe, our character designer, Danny Hynes, used to love to do something he called “threat of activation†— which was inspired by what we would see in a lot of Ghibli films, but particularly in Kiki’s. There are elements on backgrounds that are drawn as cels, the transparent sheets on which animators draw movable objects. They don’t move, but you feel like they could. So there’s loaves of bread in the bakery. They’re cels, so when you watch the scene, you feel like anyone could reach up and grab that. It’s a way of using the medium that is so subtle, but it’s super cool. That’s in Whisper of the Heart as well, which was directed by Yoshifumi Kondo, but was storyboarded and written by Miyazaki. There are books on a table that look like you could pick them up, but no one does!
Danny Hynes (character designer, Steven Universe, Venture Bros.): “Threat of activation†is a malapropism from Limited Resources, a Magic the Gathering podcast. I couldn’t tell you the accurate description, but those were the words rattling around in my head when we were trying to figure out this technique that Miyazaki does. It lit my brain on fire because it’s such a simple trick. It’s not new technology. This would’ve been available to everyone who’s ever worked in animation. All you do is paint something with a flat color instead of in a rendered way on the background, and then don’t move it. But because of the language of animation, the audience is like, Oh, that could move!
Marco watches the dead ascend
Porco Rosso (1992)
Jennifer Yuh Nelson: A lot of the actual emotional story of Porco Rosso isn’t told. You don’t necessarily see the transformation of this fighter pilot into a pig, you don’t see how it happened, or what happened. He’s just a pig. And then there’s this one scene where he talks about when he was human and the last time he saw his friends because they didn’t come back from that mission that changed him.
That scene is about the understated way Miyazaki approaches storytelling, to make it feel more real, and often dreamlike. It has more impact than yelling and screaming. Marco (who later becomes Porco) is passed out in combat, and he wakes up and sees this flat, still sea of clouds. You see his plane. It’s flying, but it looks like it’s basically alone. And you see him looking around, wondering what’s happening in that utter stillness. One plane rises through, pulling these gorgeous drapes of clouds with it, and then it’s followed by another plane and another. It’s all of his friends, and he knows that they’re dead. This is the moment that he sees them pass on. He’s trying to catch their attention and sees them go past him and go high up above into the sky. And it’s done very quietly.
Then you see all the other pilots from the war, and they’re joining together in this formation of planes above. Not only was it amazingly poetic, it’s also a beautiful way to tell the history and the sacrifice of all these pilots. That really hit me when I saw it. That could have been done in so many more bombastic ways, but I think people remember that scene because it’s about the loneliness that Porco felt after being left behind.
The demon boar attacks
Princess Mononoke (1997)
Tomm Moore: The opening sequence, with the big forest god covered in the dark oozy stuff, is cut like a crazy action fantasy, like Star Wars or something. It was an early use of computer animation to augment the hand-drawn animation, but it’s still really timeless. Miyazaki was wise enough to keep a hand-drawn look even when he used computer elements. It’s an amazing sequence, in the way it’s all animated, edited, cut together, and how the action works. Ashitaka’s arm becomes infected with the darkness that’s all around the forest god. It’s not like Tom and Jerry where they get knocked on the head and then the next minute they’re okay again. There are consequences.
Tonally, Princess Mononoke, Totoro, and Spirited Away are all very different, but there’s animism they share. Everything has a kind of life, a kind of spirit. And there’s always a moment where the characters stop and eat and the films really get into the minutiae of world building, where we see that laces can become undone and have to be re-tied, and clothes can get wet if it rains and have to be changed. There’s a verisimilitude to the worlds he creates. He doesn’t use cartoon tropes.
When my co-director Ross Stewart and I were doing Wolfwalkers, we sort of said, “Okay, well, if Song of the Sea was like My Neighbor Totoro, this is more like Princess Mononoke.†We wanted it to be an action fantasy like that. And our assistant director Mark Mullery was such a Miyazaki fanatic that he would’ve gone through Mononoke frame by frame if time allowed, analyzing it. So it was a constant point of reference during the production, the action-packed sequences mixed with slower character moments. That is why we wanted to have things like the characters eating and drinking. That was definitely coming from what we loved about how Mononoke managed to have both these simple, mindful, amazing spiritual moments and the super-kinetic action sequences.
Kaya defends her friends
Peter Sohn (director, Elemental, The Good Dinosaur): There is a moment that has forever haunted me, and it is one of the quickest shots in the film. In the boar sequence, there are these three young farm girls, and they’re all wearing sun-shade hats. Ashitaka is trying to control a beast that comes into this open field, sets its eyes on these farm girls, and heads toward them. Ashitaka tries to run alongside the beast, to slow it down so he can take its attention away from these three young women.
But the shot I’m talking about is when the three girls notice what’s happening and begin to run away. One of them trips, falls, and the other friend that’s closest to her bends down to pick her up and the third one behind them, Ashitaka’s sister, Kaya, pulls out a sword and flashes it to defend her friends.
In this electric moment, you can feel all the relationships, the honor and strength among them in one shot. There are so many moments in Miyazaki’s films that do that — use a quick gesture and a specificity of behavior to paint detail to characters that are never again seen in the movie. These three characters take up no real estate, yet they have a lasting imprint because of these gestures of love.
No-Face eats the frog spirit
Spirited Away (2001)
Jorge R. Gutierrez: I saw Spirited Away at a low point in my career. I wasn’t finding work, and my wife and I went to see it. We had heard a ton about it, so expectations were already high. We went to a theater in Santa Monica on a Tuesday. (I still remember it was a Tuesday!) The theater was half empty. It came on, and I felt like I got to go to Japan, to another culture and inside of Miyazaki and into his soul. I felt like I got invited to a party in a place I was not from, yet everyone there welcomed me, and I said: “That’s exactly my dream, to make a movie that does that with Mexican Day of the Dead culture.†I wanted to invite the world to Mexico and make them feel like Miyazaki made me feel about his country. The Book of Life wouldn’t exist without Spirited Away.
That to me is the biggest influence: A man can be a representation of Japan and anime in a way that’s authentic to Japanese audiences, yet the whole world claims him as a beloved creator because his work is so universal in its themes and emotions. That’s the holy grail, when you can be a prophet in both lands.
The sequence that takes my breath away to this day is the moment when No-Face eats the frog spirit. At this point in the film, there have been hints of brutality, but we’ve been treading lightly. And then it turns into a horror movie and an action film. It’s a true fairy tale in that way. It escalates and it escalates and it escalates.
No-Face starts out as a peaceful-looking design that becomes grotesque, with a gigantic mouth. He starts eating people, and the reaction shots of people running away are pure horror. The camera is trying to keep up with this thing coming at you, relentlessly. The first time I saw it, I almost thought: Is this not for kids? The music and the sound design are also amazing; you hear all the stuff being broken around it. And if you watch it with no sound, it’s still really scary. I remember watching it in the theater and going, “I can’t wait to watch that again.â€
By the time that whole sequence dies down, it’s a great metaphor for adulthood — trying to take everything in and carry everything on your back and carry all these feelings. And then finally letting go and being at peace with oneself. There’s a balance between beauty and fear and compassion that happens in that sequence that’s remarkable. And with no words, by the way, it’s all visual. Play that at my funeral.
Calcifer burns
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Peter Sohn: Calcifer is this demon that was a heart to this moving building. When you first meet that character, you just see it as this little flame in what looks like an open stove. Then as the film builds, you begin to understand how he’s cursed, how he’s stuck there, and how he is indebted to Howl and sort of in love with him, and how ultimately he, as the heart of this giant castle, lives and dies where Howl does. In making Elemental, a movie about elements like fire and water, Calcifer was one of the first things we looked at to understand bringing life to a gas. There’s so many wonderful animation techniques in Calcifer. The exposition for a fire character is difficult, but Miyazaki achieves it in the way Howl places pans on this poor demon on the stovetop and squashes him, and the way then he feeds him chunks of bacon and watches the flame “eat.†There are no organs inside a fire. There’s no mouth pocket, but you believe all of it because of the attention to detail of the movement.
There is one moment when the castle is falling apart. Calcifer’s gesture of love is this last lift that brings the castle back together. The flame grows gigantic, almost like a flaming bodybuilder, with pecs. This character who begins as a small little campfire gives everything he can to save this home. I can’t say Ember is based on Calcifer, but a lot of lessons about how that creature was animated inspired us to find behavior and effects and movements that could be just as heartwarming.
Sophie finds romance in midair
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Domee Shi (director, Turning Red): I don’t know how Miyazaki, this old Japanese man, made the greatest meet-cute of all time. It’s got everything. It’s suspenseful. There’s danger, there’s intimacy, there’s magic, there’s heart fluttering. He shoots it completely from Sophie’s point of view. We feel her nervousness when two guards corner her in that dark alley, and then all of a sudden, a tall, mysterious figure comes up behind her, and protectively puts an arm around her. That’s your first introduction to Howl. He saves her, but then he whisks her away into the air because he’s being followed, and they end up waltzing into the sky to escape.
All of the details Miyazaki puts into this sequence make us feel what Sophie’s feeling. He emphasizes things like the glittery jewelry that Howl is wearing. He animates a glint to them — that’s the first thing you notice when Howl enters the shot. He also animates Howl’s beautiful hair falling in front of his eyes. Every time he turns his head, that hair moves fluidly with him. His delicate hands drape over her shoulder, and again when he hoists her into the sky and they start walking together. You get this fluttering feeling of first love, of attraction, of danger.
It’s incredible how he was able to design and animate Howl in a way to appeal to the female gaze. Not a lot of male directors, let alone male animation directors, can do that, but he was able to with Howl’s design, his movement, his speech, his actions, and what he does with Sophie. Miyazaki treats the feelings of girls and women in a lot of his stories seriously and sincerely. He puts as much love and effort into this moment as he does with his action sequences.
As I was making Turning Red, I wanted to show and honor the heart of a girl onscreen like Miyazaki has done, and make you care about what this girl cares about. In the boy band sequence at the end, where Mei’s reaching up for her crush and he’s about to whisk her away, I was of course inspired by Howl’s in every way possible.
Ponyo runs across the fishy waves
Ponyo (2008)
Jorge R. Gutierrez: I feel like Ponyo was a really experimental film for him. He was just trying stuff. It’s almost jazz. The first time I saw it, I was blown away by the artistry, but I didn’t get it. It took my son — he must have been 7 — and seeing him react to it for me to fall in love with it. Today, when I think of Ponyo, the running sequence is the moment I think of. I’ve watched musicians do stuff they’re known for, and play it incredibly well, just to remind everybody in the room who they were. That sequence is him saying, Hey, I’m still fucking Miyazaki. That Ponyo run is insane. It’s three-quarter perspective, the camera is moving, everything is moving, the speed! I’m sure there’s a cemetery with animators who died animating that sequence, because holy cow.
A Note on Frame Rates
Tomm Moore: In Miyazaki’s work, he doesn’t even animate everything super smoothly. Some of the animation — it’s really masterful — but he’s clever with frame rates. I think he’s got a very specific way of going back into scenes and in-betweening in them, so sometimes there’ll be a specific effect on a character: They’re blown away by something, but there’s no wind in the scene; their hair will just blow. He brings in these little touches of magical realism, and it’s all just in the timing of the animation. That’s why at the end of Ponyo, when she turns into a little girl again, the animation freezes on her up in the air with her and SÅsuke’s two noses kissing. And that’s so magical; that’s really Miyazaki.
Jiro’s mind takes flight
The Wind Rises (2013)
Domee Shi: This was one of the most exciting scenes in The Wind Rises: Jiro Horikoshi, an airplane designer, is at his desk, coming out of his fantasy. As he’s sketching and calculating furiously, the wind is blowing and the pages are fluttering and whipping past him. He’s so driven to design and create these planes that it’s almost as if Miyazaki is animating what his own inspiration looks like. The specific animator whom he assigned to that scene, Shinya Ohira, is incredible. He has a very unique style. You see it peppered in a lot of Miyazaki’s work. He also did the opening of The Boy and the Heron — the firebombing sequence of Mahito running through Tokyo. His work is all warbly and crazy because he draws things off-model, differently from how the characters are designed. It’s all fluid and energetic. And whenever I see an Ohira scene in a movie, I’m like, Oh my God, there it is. It’s rare that you’d know many Japanese animators except for Miyazaki, but even a perfectionist like him will let someone like Ohira go to town to nail the emotion of the scene rather than the character models.
Mahito and Kiriko slice open the fish
The Boy and the Heron (2023)
Takeshi Honda (animation director, The Boy and the Heron, Millennium Actress): The scene where Mahito and Kiriko slice open the fish had the most back-and-forth between myself and Miyazaki-san. There was a difference of opinion between how Mahito would slice and dig his blade into the fish. Miyazaki would never verbally criticize what I did. But he just came back to me with a lot of feedback, saying, “No, it should be this much. It should be drawn like this. That’s not what I had in mind.†Kiriko is very well practiced in gutting a fish, so she just hops on and does her thing. Mahito is not that well practiced. He’s supposed to be clumsy. The way we were trying to depict the clumsiness, Miyazaki kept coming back to me and saying, “No, no, no, that’s not right.â€
When he gives feedback to, for example, key frames and whatnot, he tends to embellish the sequence. When we have the key art submitted, he traces over it when he wants to make a correction and says, “No, no, no this way.†Later in the scene, when they cut open the fish, what we ultimately have is the guts spilling out, in this sudden motion. That was a result of going back and forth between Miyazaki and the key animators. He tends to embellish sequences like that.
Rebecca Sugar: When a lot of people say “realism,†they mean line mileage. They mean hyper-detailed. So many of The Boy and the Heron’s most subtle and interesting animal actions are clearly so carefully observed. I love that there is just bird shit everywhere, because that’s what it would really be like if there was a giant flock of birds! I don’t even want to say it’s realism, because some of it is so heightened and so pushed, but it’s naturalistic and it’s observed. That has so much power to it. Those references to real people and real creatures and real, experienced moments come through so profoundly. It’s aspirational, especially to a cartoonist, trying to find that balance: When do you do something that feels heightened, when do you do something that feels subtle? But through all of it, it has to feel honest.