Auteur Research - Hayao Miyazaki

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HAYAO MIYAZAKI

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Situated in a park on the outskirts of Tokyo is the Studio Ghibli Museum, dedicated to the works of Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki is the most beloved director in Japan today, especially since his film "Spirited Away" won the Oscar for the best-animated film in 2002. His crafts have set a new standard for animated films today. Not only does he hand draw the characters and storyboards for the films he directs, but he also writes the screenplays, which blends Japanese mythology with modern psychological realism. He is an auteur of animated entertainment and perhaps the world's first. 

Miyazaki's films are either original stories or his own adaptations of fairly obscure works. Though they contain set pieces of suspenseful action, he is particularly fond of airship battles and dramatic rescues in the sky. Some of his characters can be threatening or unappealing, but also complex and capable of change, like the moody young wizard in "Howl's Moving Castle". It is said that Miyazaki's hostile characters are capable of redemption, they prove capable of a kind of shape-shifting, which allows them to reveal a different facet of themselves.

Miyazaki's films are also evident for their concentration with the environment and their not entirely metaphorical suggestion that the natural world is capable of remembering what's been done to it. He believes that we "harbour memories in our DNA from before we took the form of humans". For instance, in "Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind" (1984) is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans live huddled on the edge of a toxic forest. Its heroine finds beauty in the lush, strangely coloured undergrowth and the giant cicada-like insects that live there, fostering a grudge against the humans who've poisoned their habitat. 


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