Miyazaki started out unable to draw people, so he drew battleships
The teenager who would make Spirited Away wanted to be a manga artist but found he could not draw human figures, so for years he sketched planes, tanks and warships instead. He also burned much of his early work because it copied Osamu Tezuka too closely. That stubborn streak shaped Studio Ghibli.
Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941, the second of four sons. His father ran a family firm making rudders for fighter planes, which kept the household comfortable through the war, yet his earliest memories are of bombed cities; the family fled Utsunomiya after it was bombed in July 1945. A sickly boy told he might not reach 20, he watched his mother Yoshiko battle spinal tuberculosis from 1947 to 1955. She was strict, frugal and quick to question convention, and she later inspired several of his characters.
The spark for animation came in his final year of high school, when he skipped exam revision to watch The White Snake Enchantress (1958), Japan's first colour animated feature. It moved him to tears and convinced him to make work that affirmed the world rather than chasing trends. At Gakushuin University he studied political economy but spent his energy on art, filling thousands of pages with unfinished manga openings.
In 1963 he joined Toei Doga as an inbetweener, the junior artist who draws the frames between key poses, earning 19,500 yen a month while paying 6,000 for a tiny tatami room. He found the work dull, but his suggested new ending for Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon was adopted. He led a labour dispute and in 1964 became chief secretary of the union, whose vice-chairman, Isao Takahata, became his lifelong collaborator. On Takahata's Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968) he designed scenes; the film was praised yet did so badly that it threatened Toei financially.
After directing The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) and adapting his own manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, he co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985. Princess Mononoke (1997) became the first animated film to win the Japan Academy's top picture prize, and Spirited Away (2001) topped Japan's all-time box office and took an Oscar. He retired in 2013, then returned with The Boy and the Heron (2023), another Oscar winner. Recurring threads include nature against technology, pride in craft and strong young heroines.
Source: Hayao Miyazaki
