Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki (born January 5, 1941) is a Japanese animator, director, and screenwriter whose films helped establish Studio Ghibli as an international force in animation. He joined Toei Animation in 1963 after graduating from Gakushuin University with degrees in political science and economics. At Toei, he worked as an in-between artist on Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon and became involved in the labor union, eventually serving as its chief secretary. His early collaborations with director Isao Takahata included work on Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), an ambitious feature for which Miyazaki contributed scene design and ideas. After leaving Toei, Miyazaki worked at A-Pro and Nippon Animation on television series, including Future Boy Conan (1978), which he directed. He made his feature directorial debut with The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), featuring Arsène Lupin III. His manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind began serialization in Animage in 1982; the 1984 film adaptation, produced by Takahata and animated by Topcraft, led directly to the founding of Studio Ghibli in 1985. Ghibli released Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky in 1986, My Neighbor Totoro in 1988, Kiki’s Delivery Service in 1989, and Porco Rosso in 1992. Princess Mononoke (1997), set amid conflict between an industrial settlement and forest spirits, became Japan’s highest-grossing domestic film at the time. Spirited Away (2001), about Chihiro’s journey through a spirit world, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and remains a landmark of hand-drawn animation. Miyazaki adapted Diana Wynne Jones’s novel into Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), directed the seaside fantasy Ponyo (2008), and made The Wind Rises (2013), a fictionalized account centered on aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi. He announced retirement from feature filmmaking after that film, but returned to direct The Boy and the Heron (2023). The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2024, making Miyazaki the first person to win that award twice as a director. His films repeatedly place children at the center of dangerous, yet morally complex worlds: Nausicaä seeks coexistence with the toxic Sea of Corruption, while San fights to protect a forest from Lady Eboshi’s ironworks. Miyazaki has also drawn storyboards himself, treating them as the basis of production, and his Ghibli work combines detailed mechanical design with environmental conflict and antiwar concerns. In 2001, the Ghibli Museum opened in Mitaka, Tokyo, designed by Miyazaki and exhibiting material from Studio Ghibli films for many young visitors.