The co-founder of Studio Ghibli and the single most important animator of the last fifty years.
Hayao Miyazaki worked as an animator at Toei Animation in the 1960s, then at A Pro and Nippon Animation through the 1970s. He directed his first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro, in 1979. In 1985 he co-founded Studio Ghibli with Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki. He has directed eleven feature films at Ghibli. He has announced his retirement three times, most recently before returning to make The Boy and the Heron (2023).
Miyazaki draws his films himself. He has resisted CGI almost entirely — Ghibli has used limited digital compositing since the late 1990s, but the animation remains hand-drawn on paper, scanned, and inked traditionally. He sketches storyboards in colour and refuses to lock a script before production begins; he discovers the film as he draws it.
His films have won every major animation award and one Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (Spirited Away, 2002). Spirited Away remained the highest-grossing film in Japanese history for nearly twenty years until Demon Slayer overtook it in 2020.
Miyazaki has spoken about the Japanese aesthetic principle of 'ma' — negative space, the deliberate pause. His films contain scenes that pause for almost no narrative reason: Totoro standing at a bus stop in the rain, Chihiro on a train across the water, San and Ashitaka watching deer. The pauses are doing emotional work that Hollywood animation typically doesn't allow.
American animation is structured for continuous forward momentum. Miyazaki refuses this. The pauses are why his films land emotionally in a way few competitors achieve.
Miyazaki's career-long obsession with flight — Porco Rosso, The Wind Rises, Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaä — comes from his father, who ran an aircraft-parts factory during WWII. The flight sequences are animated with attention to the physics: wind catches the wings, weight shifts, characters lean into turns.
It's the same attention to weight that makes the food sequences (the dumplings in Spirited Away, the breakfasts in Howl's Moving Castle) so memorable. Things have mass.
Most Miyazaki films do not have a clear antagonist. Princess Mononoke's Lady Eboshi is destroying the forest and also providing refuge for sex workers and lepers. The witch in Howl's Moving Castle is rendered as a sad fat woman. The wind itself is the closest thing to a villain in The Wind Rises. Miyazaki has been explicit about this: he doesn't believe in the moral category of 'villain'.
This is also why parents argue about whether Miyazaki films are 'really for children'. The films assume children can handle moral complexity, and they're correct.
If you've never watched a Miyazaki film:
Russian animator Yuri Norstein, French illustrator Jean Giraud (Moebius), the films of Akira Kurosawa, Lewis Carroll's Alice books, the Polish-British author Diana Wynne Jones.