When he was a child, Hayao Miyazaki dreamed of flight. Some nights, he imagined his body skimming the clouds above the Japanese cities of Utsunomiya and Kanuma, where he grew up; on others, the magic would suddenly cut out, and he would twist and hurtle downwards, waking with a jump before he hit the earth.
His father, Katsuji, ran a company called Miyazaki Airplane, which manufactured tail fins for Japanese fighter planes during the Second World War. When he visited the factory, young Hayao was spellbound by the mechanised cleverness of the parts: the way this wire joined to this mast and operated that rudder, and so on. But he made no conscious connection between the objects his father made every day and the places his mind took him at night.
“In my head, they were totally separate,” he says, and then chuckles. “It’s probably a great psychoanalytic study case. I loved aeroplanes because they were incredible machines, but the speed and the height of flying – these were things that were easy to understand as a child. I think a lot of people have the dreams I had.”
In Japan, Miyazaki’s animations are as popular as blockbusters, and around the world, families and cinephiles both anticipate his new work like children counting down to Christmas Day. John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Disney and a co-founder of Pixar, describes him as “one of the greatest film-makers of our time”. I’d broadly agree, although I’d replace “our” with “all”.
He has made 11 films, and his latest, The Wind Rises, will be his last. The first 10 were made, first and foremost, for children. Most have bold, young heroines, under 10 years old or in their early teens, and all show a deep-rooted love, even awe, of nature.
Some, like My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, are about kids who discover magical places and creatures hidden in reality’s cracks. Others, like Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle, are escapades, set in the kind of lands where pigs might fly, and sometimes do. Now 73, he’s bowing out with something different. The Wind Rises is a biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese designer of fighter planes in the Thirties – most famously, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the model his father’s factory helped build.
Around the film’s biographical core are braided details borrowed from literature: faces and ideas from Thomas Mann’s great novel of interwar uncertainty, The Magic Mountain, and a tragic love story drawn from The Wind Has Risen, a book by the Japanese writer Tatsuo Hori. Jiro’s life plays out across a backdrop of grand visual astonishments. An early sequence shows the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which shuffles Tokyo’s buildings like playing cards. Later, during a trip to Nazi Germany in 1938, Jiro witnesses Kristallnacht play out in gaslit silhouette.
Even by Miyazaki’s own eccentric standards, The Wind Rises is an odd and melancholy piece: it’s the kind of film studios often call “a passion project”. Could there be flickers of autobiography in it, too? In the first scene, we see 10-year-old Jiro dream of climbing onto the roof of his house and into a strange, winged contraption which lifts him up above the surrounding rivers and fields.
Later, after devouring a book on aviation, Jiro has another dream in which he meets the great Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, whose own warplane, the Ca. 309 Ghibli, later lent its name to Miyazaki’s studio. “Aeroplanes are beautiful dreams,” Caproni tells Jiro. “Engineers turn dreams into reality.”
Miyazaki, the great engineer of dreams, rarely gives interviews. He prefers to let his films speak for him, along with the Ghibli Museum: a fun-crammed gallery, playground and shrine to his work in the leafy Tokyo suburb of Mitaka.
Hayao Miyazaki in Tokyo in 2010 (Photo: Nicolas Guerin)
Nevertheless, today we are a few stops further down the railway line. Around 10 minutes’ walk from Ghibli’s main office building, down a narrow lane and past a nursery school, there is a large, wooden house surrounded by pine trees. You would never find yourself there by accident, and if you did, you would soon walk past – which is, of course, the idea.
Miyazaki calls this building, which he designed himself, “The Pig’s House”, and effectively it’s his private studio. Most of the ground floor is given over to a large, airy room warmed by a wood-burning stove. A staircase leads up to a narrow bridge, which stretches across the middle of the room, around 10ft off the floor, and to the door of the director’s upstairs workshop.
When I arrive, Miyazaki is sitting downstairs at a table in front of the stove, sipping black coffee from a mug. He looks serious and kind, with a wide smile and dimples that touch the top of his silver-white beard, black-caterpillar eyebrows, and crinkled eyes that shine behind large, dark-rimmed glasses. It’s the kind of face he would draw. This is where Miyazaki makes his films – here, upstairs and across the bridge, in his workshop. As well as writing The Wind Rises and sketching its storyboards here, he drew many of the frames of animation, sometimes working alone, and sometimes with a team of 30 or so further artists in the studio’s surprisingly small main building. (In industry terms, this is a skeleton crew: by comparison, around 250 artists and animators worked on Disney’s Frozen.)
The Wind Rises started out as a manga, or comic strip, for a modelling magazine, full of doodled asides about the inner workings of engines and the ideal passage of air around a wing. It was meant to go no further. Miyazaki drew it to unwind after the release of his 10th film, Ponyo, in 2008. But Toshio Suzuki, his long-serving producer, convinced him it should become a feature.
“I thought the suggestion was outrageous,” he says. “People who are interested in aeroplanes are decreasing. Aeroplanes are objects of the 20th century. And both Jiro and Tatsuo Hori are representative of a time before I was born. So, I said no.”
Over three months, Suzuki talked him round. The chance to make such a personal film must have been too good to refuse, I say, but he swats away the suggestion that the picture is a veiled self-portrait. “I think that both Jiro and Tatsuo Hori are greater men than I, so I can’t put myself beside them,” he says. “I’ve been very blessed to make animation for 50 years in peaceful times, while they lived in very volatile, violent times. But I think the peaceful time that we are living in is coming to an end.”
High class: The core of 'The Wind Rises' is a biopic of World War Two aircraft designer, Jiro Horikoshi
Miyazaki was born in January 1941. One of his first memories is an Allied bombing raid, when he was four-and-a-half years old, and waking in the night to see Utsunomiya in flame. He later recalled fleeing the city, running and holding onto his father’s hand, but feeling unafraid because the light from the burning buildings meant the sky was as bright as morning.
His father was a lover of cinema, and took young Hayao to see films by the great Japanese directors of the time, like Ozu and Mizoguchi, as well as the latest pictures from Europe. He recalls seeing De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, and more. These films stayed with him, even though, at the time, he hadn’t fully understood them. This, he hopes, is how his younger fans will respond to his final work.
“Bicycle Thieves was black and white and depicted life as being hard, with the young boy and his father trudging around the city,” he says. “I remember coming out of the cinema and thinking, 'I didn’t understand that’.
“In fact, I often came home from the cinema feeling like that! So when I realised that The Wind Rises could be the same that’s when I decided, 'OK, let’s bet everything we have at Ghibli on this movie’. The film is a little harder than the others, but the children who see it will some day understand it.”
His father also took him to see classic Disney cartoons, but they didn’t do much for him: it was only in 1958, when he was 17 years old, that he fell in love with animation. Miyazaki went to see The Tale of the White Serpent, the first animated feature to be made in Japan. At the time, his ambition was to become a manga artist, and he was sketching what he describes as “an absurdist drama”, but the purity of the emotion in The Tale of the White Serpent moved him to tears.
“It made me realise what a fool I was,” he wrote two decades later. “Despite the words of distrust I spoke, I yearned for an earnest and pure world…. I could no longer deny the fact that I wanted to make something life affirming.”
After graduating in 1963, he took an artist’s job at Toei Animation, where he met his future wife, Akemi, and also Isao Takahata, who later became a co-founder of Ghibli. They collaborated on many cartoon series: one, about a swashbuckling thief called Lupin III, led to a spin-off film, called The Castle of Cagliostro. Miyazaki directed it, and it was released in 1979.
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His second film was an ecologically conscious science-fiction adventure called Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It was produced by Takahata and was a surprise hit. A tie-in manga series, which Miyazaki had only drawn to raise money for the film, had created a fan-base, who queued on opening night. Spurred on, the two men founded their own production company in June 1985, with help from Toshio Suzuki, who had met them in his capacity as editor of a monthly animation magazine.
The name Ghibli was proposed by Miyazaki, who had found it, like Jiro, in an aviation textbook. (At first, he mispronounced it “Ji-bli”, and the mispronunciation stuck.) It’s an Arabic term adopted by Italian pilots to refer to the hot, dry siroccos that blow across the Mediterranean from the Sahara. He hoped to bring fresh air to a stale industry, so the word was just right.
Almost three decades have passed since then, and 20 Ghibli films have been made, nine of which were directed by Miyazaki. Their reputation is as high as it ever has been. But today, there’s a strange atmosphere at the studio, as if Miyazaki’s retirement might be the first step in a broader winding-down. Takahata’s next film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, will also be his last, and only one further picture, an adaptation of the Joan G Robinson novel When Marnie Was There, is currently in production. Work on all other projects has been suspended.
Later, in his office, Toshio Suzuki describes the feeling of exhaustion at the studio – “We have no future plans. We just want to take some time off,” he says, with a rueful chuckle – but it seems possible that something more is being left unsaid.
Suzuki is 65, with salt-and-pepper stubble, a quick smile and a mischievous aspect. His office, which seems to be half-built from tightly stuffed folders and notebooks, is more like a head teacher’s than that of a world-renowned producer. On one wall is a glass-fronted cupboard containing bottles of beer, soft toys and action figures. Behind them are a Golden Bear award, from the Berlin Film Festival, and an Oscar, both for Spirited Away.
He now wonders if the new film may be too oblique, too strange: “Somewhere in my head, I’m thinking we should have made it more accessible,” he says. “But I said to Miyazaki that if he didn’t make this movie, he would feel like he had not done everything he needed to do.”
Can Ghibli continue to make films without Miyazaki and Takahata – and Suzuki, for that matter, who quietly announced his own retirement from his producing role in March? The thought of a world with no new Ghibli films, let alone no new Miyazaki films, is hard to take.
But the beauty of impermanence, even incompleteness, is central to Japanese culture: even the Grand Shrine at Ise, the holiest building in the Shinto religion, is torn down and rebuilt every 20 years from virgin wood. There’s a term for it, wabi-sabi, although its precise meaning, perhaps like the sentiment behind it, does not translate easily.
For now, retirement for Miyazaki means spending time with his grandson, and also drawing another manga. He pulls a few pages from a folder: it’s a samurai story with impossibly intricate battle scenes. Later, when I mention it to Suzuki, he laughs and says: “That will never be made into a film.”
He also hopes to create three new animated shorts which will be shown at the Ghibli Museum. Miyazaki famously recommends that parents should restrict their children to watching his films only once a year, and loves that the Museum’s repertoire of short films cannot be seen anywhere else, so that the very experience of watching them becomes a memory to be treasured.
(He has little fondness for the modern movie-going experience: appalled by the multi-directional boominess of today’s cinema sound-systems, he insisted that The Wind Rises’s audio track should be mixed in mono.) There’s something deeply wabi-sabi about this, but then Miyazaki’s films are alive with wabi-sabi-ness. Their best moments are often hushed interludes in which his characters are simply thinking, or waiting, and time’s passage fades to a murmur.
In The Wind Rises, there’s a sequence in which Jiro, holidaying in the mountains, spends days flying paper aeroplanes purely for the fun of it, and it’s probably the best, most beautiful thing in the film. In Spirited Away, we watch the young heroine Chihiro riding a train across the surface of a glassy lake; in My Neighbour Totoro, Satsuki and Mei, two normally irrepressible young girls, wait pensively for their father at a bus stop while night falls. They’re joined by Totoro, the fuzzy forest spirit, who doesn’t do much more than wait with them. “Placing these scenes in a story gives me great joy,” he says, “because their meaning cannot be explained in words, only images. That’s what films have to do.”
He recalls a friend’s account of showing My Neighbour Totoro to a class of children in nursery school, and describes the joyful energy of their reactions: their widening eyes and mouths when four-year-old Mei finds Totoro asleep in the hollow root of a camphor tree; their shrieks of delight when she clambers onto his stomach and watches him snore. During the bus-stop scene, he says, the children all sat in silence; some held onto a friend’s or teacher’s hand for reassurance, while others scampered under a table to watch from there.
“They were tense, maybe even a little scared, but it’s not like they didn’t want to watch,” he says. “For as long as the moment lasted, they were lost in it. And that made me so happy.”
The Wind Rises is in cinemas from Friday 9 May
