I’m tired of talking about Hayao Miyazaki, yet I can’t bring myself to stop talking about Hayao Miyazaki, and I think that I’ve become an accidental evangelist.

The renowned animator turned 81-years old this past January, and I’m afraid that the worlds that he has prophesied for the last fifty years are finally, hideously, blooming into fruition. To most viewers, this kind of dread isn’t the view of the world of Studio Ghibli that they’re accustomed. The films of Miyazaki are regarded as tenderhearted, taking place in lush, overgrown landscapes where magic reigns supreme. The mythos of the auteur is focused entirely on a man who understands the magic itself, but is there more to Miyazaki than a grandfatherly character who has never directed an unsuccessful film? For almost five decades, Hayao Miyazaki has been warning us of a world imploding on itself, and it’s time we paid attention as to where that messaging comes from. 

Hayao Miyazaki is possibly the most decorated animator in human history, as the co-founder, alongside animator Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, of Japan’s beloved Studio Ghibli. He’s often referred to in passing as a kind of Walt Disney-esque figure of Japan, a comparison that is silly at best, and an unintended insult at worst. “Luddite” might be a more accurate description, as Miyazaki is infamous for banging the drum against his perceived inferiority of modern animation, once noting, “I think 2-D animation disappeared from Disney because they made so many uninteresting films.”

The word “uninteresting” has a stronger twinge of disdain when you consider in 1988, Miyazaki himself wrote, “The barrier to both entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.” From this moral vantage point, classic films from Disney Studios were created out of boredom and provided no nuance of morality for young viewers, a most severe trespass against the human conditions developed during youth.  

Miyazaki had a childhood that is unfamiliar to the ways in which most of his young fans live, and it doesn’t help that there’s a collective forgetfulness in western countries about the experience of Japanese civilians during World War II. Narratives about destruction and rebuilding might come naturally to someone whose earliest memories were punctuated by air raid sirens. His family managed to make it out of the 1945 firebombing of the town of Utsunomiya alive and unhurt when he was of preschool age, but when describing the event to his biographer, his rooted memory was escaping in his family truck and the woman with her small child who ran after them in vain. 

A childhood by fire gave way to an adolescence of taking on adult responsibilities and nursing his tuberculosis stricken mother, so it’s understandable that Miyazaki might recognize children as both innocent of their circumstances, but more well aware of the current moment than parents give them credit for. Portrayals of childhood in Studio Ghibli films are treated with great care and nuance, and children are often matched up against seemingly impossible odds, using their own ingenuity, grit, and clear-eyed love for humanity as the special ingredients to help bring their worlds back into balance. While our youngest heroes aren’t thrust into conflicts that overtly reference conflicts existing in the real world, it’s widely acknowledged that antiwar and peace activism are central to the messaging. For example, the floating kingdom of Laputa in 1986’s Castle in the Sky is destroyed by a duo of preteen protagonists who recognize this act as a better alternative to seeing it converted into a cataclysmic war machine. 

Miyazaki has become a bit of a meme. His opinions on modernity and anime culture make the social media rounds every time he’s captured on camera, often lamenting age, exhaustion, and a constant disdain for child rearing practices that he views as tarnishing imagination. The idea of this elder being simply grumpy adds to his mythos of razor sharpness dulled by gentle delivery. In 2021, GQ applied a sweeter, “grumpier” lens to moments like his 2016 rant against young animators during a demonstration of their work, which he referred to as “an insult to life itself.” If curmudgeonly grumpiness is what we’re using to describe the legend of Miyazaki’s persona, then I question what abject frustration and mean-spiritedness would look like! 

As a filmmaker whose magic resides in speaking directly to children and the children inside of adults, it’s expected that Hayao Miyazaki is as sweet at home as his films suggest, but as the anime scholar and professor Dr. Susan Napier phrased it in her book Miyazakiworld, “You do not become the world’s greatest animator, the head of a major studio, and the progenitor of a string of hit movies by being cozy and comfortable.”

In Miyazakiworld, Dr. Napier describes how Miyazaki would spend all day animating, and draw his masterpiece, the manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, starting at midnight and into the early morning hours. On the role of his wife, fellow animator Akemi Ota, Miyazaki admitted that she would, “often do the things that fathers normally do,” such as playing games and hiking, all while maintaining the household. When the filmmaking is beautiful enough, we conveniently forget the price that comes with genius at the expense of family.  

This was demonstrated upon his oldest son Goro Miyazaki’s completion of his first film, Tales From Earthsea in 2006. Fans lashed out with confusion when a video clip of the elder Miyazaki walking out on his son’s film for a cigarette break went viral, as he expressed boredom, disappointment, and a lack of fatherly support. Last year, Comic Book Resources published a hand-wringing account of this conflict (which, should be noted, happened about fifteen years ago) that perfectly reflects the misplaced fury from fans who may have felt betrayed by such behavior. Armed with little more than scattered quotes from both father and son, Ghibli fans oscillated between pearl clutching and inventing their own narratives to fill in the blanks. The ways in which Hayao Miyazaki mastered his craft should make the end result of a contentious father and son relationship unsurprising. They’ve long since made amends, but fans seeking a familial role model should probably look elsewhere for inspiration.  

For enthusiasts, we aren’t seeking to unravel the psyche of Miyazaki, but I hope to see a more wholly developed fandom that recognizes a human among the fantastical elements. I don’t consider him a hero of mine, even as I submerge myself in his worlds. To me, the most enticing topic of discussion is his role as a kind of apocalyptic prophet who has walked through those fires himself, and it’s only after learning of the places where his talents were forged that we can even consider the surface of the universe created by Hayao Miyazaki.  

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