Two New Books Examine the Ingenuity and the Art of Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki is a world-renowned animator from Japan. He directed his first feature The Castle of Cagliostro in 1979, and co-founded the animation production company Studio Ghibli in 1985. Miramax’s release of Princess Mononoke (1997) helped expand Miyazaki’s audience and notoriety. He is the recipient of the only Academy Award for Best Animated Feature given to an anime film, for Spirited Away (2001). Tying in with the release of his latest film, Ponyo, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Viz Media has released two books examining his work: Starting Point 1979-1996 and The Art of Ponyo.

Starting Point 1979-1996

As the title indicates, Starting Point covers the early years of Miyazaki’s career presented mostly from his perspective. The book opens with a series of very engaging and informative articles he wrote in 1979 about his process and techniques for Gekkan ehon bessatsu: Anim?shon, a Japanese animation magazine. They will be particularly valuable to those who wish to become animators even though the business has surely changed over 30 years.

The book contains a number of speeches Miyazaki gave. It was interesting to find him questioning his livelihood in a 1982 speech he gave at Waseda University, pondering whether children at the time needed forty animation programs to choose from in a week. He tells a sixth-grade class of “The Type of Film I’d Like to Create,” about bees from their perspective and gives an acceptance speech for the Japan Cartoonists Association’s Prize where he presents his “theories on the popularity of magna.”

The book also contains interviews; insightful pre-production work such as proposals and directorial memos for Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, and Porco Rosso; and articles about other art and artists like the Fleischer Studios, Fantastic Planet, and the Laserdisc liner notes for The Man Who Planted Trees and Ikiru. Sure to please collectors are even rarer items, such as a comic from a 1994 in-flight magazine for Japan Airlines, drawings from the 1981 Tokyo Movie FC Newsletter, and untranslated scrapbook pages.

Article Author: El Bicho

El Bicho writes for a number of movie web sites, including Cinema Sentries, which he runs for the geniuses of Forwerd Media. He also occasionally cleans up around here. Follow at twitter.com/ElBicho_CS

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