The Animated Life

Margaret Talbot discusses the animator Hayao Miyazaki’s films, his influences, and his temperament.

This week in the magazine, Margaret Talbot writes about the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, the writer and director of such films as “Spirited Away.” Here, with The New Yorker’s Daniel Cappello, Talbot discusses Miyazaki’s films, his influences, and his temperament.

DANIEL CAPPELLO: How did you become interested in writing about Hayao Miyazaki?

MARGARET TALBOT: My kids watched several of his movies, especially “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), on video a lot, and I started to realize that I could abide repeat viewings of them more than almost any other children's movies, with the possible exception of “The Wizard of Oz.” Naturally, I started wondering about the filmmaker who was doing me such a favor. Last summer, when I went to Japan on a United States-Japan Foundation Media Fellowship and began reporting on him, I found out that he hates the idea that children watch his films repeatedly. He's very worried about kids consuming too much media, and thinks that they should watch a movie like "Totoro" no more than once a year.

Miyazaki famously doesn’t grant interviews, but he spoke with you. Why doesn’t he like to do interviews, and how did you manage that?

It's true that Miyazaki does not like to give interviews, even in Japan, where he is really famous and beloved. I think one reason is that, while he certainly feels that he makes good movies, he feels some ambivalence about contributing to the sort of animation glut in Japan, and so is reluctant to go into promotional mode. But probably the bigger reason is that he is an intense workaholic, and resents anything that takes him away from his work. His producer and friend Toshio Suzuki told me that in the early days of their studio, Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki would work from 9 a.m. to 4:30 a.m., and that in recent years he has mellowed somewhat and goes home at midnight. Yasuo Ohtsuka, an animator who has worked with him on several projects, said that he always figured that Miyazaki thought he would die if he stopped working. And Miyazaki himself told me that his idea of a vacation was a nap. I think it was sheer luck that I got the interview—I happened to visit the studio on the very day that he had finished his latest film, "Howl's Moving Castle" (which came out in Japan in November and will be out in the U.S. next year), and he was showing the completed version to his wife and some of the staff. He was feeling relaxed and expansive, it seemed, and was willing to talk. I don't think he would have left the studio to talk to me—but there I was in his lair, where he is most comfortable. And I don't think he would have talked to me if I'd come the next day. He would already have been on to the next project.

Does Miyazaki have a specific style in the genre of anime? How does he compare with contemporary directors of animation?

Miyazaki is rather different from a lot of his contemporaries in anime, such as Mamoru Oshii ("Ghost in the Shell") and Katsuhiro Otomo ("Akira" and "Steamboy"), and, certainly, from the makers of shows like "Pokémon," "Digimon," and "Yu-Gi-Oh!" His characters don't have that big-eyed, anime look. His themes are less often science-fictiony or futuristic. Like a lot of the great British fantasy writers—C. S. Lewis or J. K. Rowling or Philip Pullman—he's very dedicated to realism in the service of fantasy, meaning that he makes little details (the way Chihiro kicks her toe into her shoes, or the way Haku the dragon falls when he's wounded) internally coherent and naturalistic. He's not into “Matrix”-like experimentation with the laws of time and space, which a lot of anime is. There's a great deal of human warmth in his films and, in “Totoro” and “Spirited Away” (2001) in particular, some nuanced attention to the psychology of children. At the risk of sounding just kind of besotted, his films are uncommonly beautiful. He has a very painterly sensibility. Finally, unlike a lot of animators, including his good friend John Lasseter, of Pixar, he isn't a fan of computer animation. He really favors the (now) old-fashioned method of hand drawing.

For people unfamiliar with his oeuvre, how would you describe his films, starting with the earlier ones, like "Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind" (1984) and "Castle in the Sky" (1986)?

“Nausicäa” is the most science-fiction-like. It takes place in an environmentally blighted future, where people live huddled on the edge of a toxic forest. But, like almost all of his films, including the charming “Castle in the Sky,” it has a very engaging, bright-eyed, natural but courageous girl as its lead character.

What about others, such as “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Princess Mononoke” (1997)?

“Princess Mononoke” is a very original and strange movie—also an environmental parable—set in medieval Japan. That and “Nausicäa” and “Porco Rosso” (1992), which is a “Casablanca”-ish story about a pig who is a flying ace in the Adriatic between the world wars, aren't for young kids—just my little parental warning. I love "My Neighbor Totoro," which is about two young sisters who move with their anthropologist father to a country house in Japan. The little girls uncover this magical world of fuzzy woodland creatures, including a bus shaped like a cat (Akira Kurosawa admired it, and somebody did a re-creation of it at Burning Man a few years ago) and a big, benign bewhiskered thing called a Totoro. The interesting thing is that you gradually realize that the girls are in a kind of crisis: their mother is in the hospital for a lengthy stay, and they are having to cope with her absence and the unpredictability of her return. Their fantasy world is one that they enter partly to find comfort. The creatures aren't as anthropomorphized as in a Disney film—they don't talk, and their sheer size suggests that they aren't quite tamable—and the girls are not as idealized. The little one throws a tantrum, the older one yells at her. They are emotionally vulnerable but physically brave, as well as powerfully imaginative and sometimes spacey—like real kids. “Kiki's Delivery Service” (1989) is also a really good family movie. It's the story of a young apprentice witch who goes to a lovely, Miyazakian city on some coast of Europe, where she has to make her own way for a time. She starts her own parcel-delivery service, by broomstick, of course. For a time, she loses her ability to fly, and rediscovers it when she needs to rescue her young (male) friend, a sweetly dorky aviation enthusiast. It's partly a movie about vocation—how to find one when you are young, and how, practically and spiritually, to make it work. It's one of the only movies I've ever seen that treats this as the basis of a narrative adventure for children.

How do these compare with his latest films, “Spirited Away” and “Howl's Moving Castle” (2004)?

His latest films are more visually sumptuous than the earlier ones—the fantasy worlds they create are even more extravagantly detailed—but, again, they are similar in that they have ordinary, ungorgeous, though likable and ultimately quite resourceful, young girls as their heroines.

You visited the Ghibli Museum, on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is dedicated to his work. What is it like, and how does it compare with other museums, especially those designed for children?

The museum reminded me of an old term for the precursors of museums—“cabinets of wonder"—because the idea of it is really to trace the creative process that goes into animated films—and especially Miyazaki's, of course—in a way that is both trippy and very beautiful. It has all these rooms where a dreamy child might be sketching backgrounds for a movie or coming up with an idea—they are kind of romanticized places, with oak furniture, jars full of colored pencils, watercolors and postcards tacked to the walls, model airplanes and flying dinosaurs hanging from the ceiling. In one of the exhibits, there's a very cool zoetrope with figures from “Totoro”—John Lasseter told me that he was enchanted by that, because it reminded him of the original meaning of animation—to bring to life, to set in motion. The museum has a movie theatre that is designed to not overwhelm children. It lets in a lot of natural light, has bench-style, child-scale seats, and a soft sound system. And it's a great building: painted in candy colors, with stained-glass windows, wooden floors, high ceilings, sort of Arts and Crafts meets Lewis Carroll. You feel good being in there.

Miyazaki’s own childhood and upbringing seem to have had an impact on his work as an adult. Can you describe that influence?

His father helped run an airplane-parts factory, a family-owned business. So he probably came by his love of airplanes and flying—which shows up throughout his work—close to home. He was one of four boys, and, of all of them, he was the closest to his mother, who was sickly and bedridden a lot of the time he was growing up but was apparently a formidable and very smart person.

What did you learn about his relationship with his family today?

He married a gifted and successful animator, who then stopped working to raise their two sons. One, Goro Miyazaki, is now the curator of the Ghibli Museum. The other son is an artist who does finely detailed wood engravings. Apparently, Miyazaki wasn't around much when his children were little—he was working all the time. Now they've formed strong professional relationships with him. Keisuke, the artist son, did some of the exhibits for the museum.

You describe Miyazaki as "detail-oriented to the point of obsession"—for example, he will take a trip around the world to find a perfect color that he has in his mind. Europe seems to be a central part of his obsession. Why is that?

For a couple of reasons. One is that he was born in 1941, so the Japan in which he lived in his early childhood was devastated by the war. He sort of took refuge in an imagined Europe. The other is that he loved fantasy literature in the European, and especially British, tradition, so that colored a lot of his own vision. He also loved European painting: Chagall and Bosch are influences he has cited.

Miyazaki seems to have definite feelings about the world today, in terms of technology and the environment and the effect they have on the way in which we perceive and live life. What does he think, and does it translate into his work?

He's a big critic of our dependence on virtual reality—computer games, TV, and animation, too. He complained, when I met him, that so much in our culture is "thin and shallow and fake." He's also an environmentalist, of a somewhat dark and apocalyptic variety. He's said, not entirely jokingly, that he looks forward to the time when Tokyo is submerged by the ocean and the NTV tower becomes an island, when the human population plummets and there are no more high-rises.

Are there countries other than Japan where animation is as popular across different age groups?

I think that Japan is unusual, if not unique, in its animation and comic-book culture. It's rich and developed there, and very respected as an art form. So you really do see people of all ages reading manga on the subway, for instance, and up to fifty per cent of book and magazine sales in Japan are of manga. There are ninety animated programs on television every week, and the genres are quite varied, from family dramas to violent cyber stuff to totally kawaii, or cute, kids' stuff. Anime fans here bristle at the idea that animation is just for children—though I think you'd have to concede that in the U.S. animation is more widely consumed by children than by adults. Miyazaki doesn't seem to have any problem with being perceived as a director who makes films primarily for children—he just thinks they should be sophisticated, good films in their own right.

You end your piece with a reflection about how harsh Miyazaki sounded in person, and yet how kind and humane his films are. What were your thoughts on this contradiction?

My feeling was that he was, by intellect and temperament, perhaps a pessimistic person, but that he has great vitality and a great respect and fondness for children, and that he wants them to make their own judgments about the world. He doesn’t want to swamp them with premature cynicism. ♦