Miyazaki is a workaholic, and that
tendency was in full force by then. "When I
was small, he would come home at 2 A.M. and get
up at 8 A.M. and do TV series all year
round," Goro Miyazaki recalled. "It was
very rare for me to see him. Every morning, I'd
look into my father's bedroom and see him
sleeping. Just to check: 'O.K., he's here. He's
in the house.' " When, in his early
thirties, Goro started working closely with his
father for the first time, on the Ghibli Museum,
he felt that he "understood his creative
processes so well precisely because he'd been
such an absent father. When I was a child, I
studied him. To learn more about him, I watched
his movies obsessively. I read everything that
was written about him. I studied his
drawings." With a rueful chuckle, he added,
"I think that I am the No. 1 expert on Hayao
Miyazaki."
When I asked Goro if he'd ever talked with his
father about what he'd learned about him, he
laughed and said no, he couldn't picture that
happening. He was closer to his mother, he said,
who would take him hiking and mountain climbing,
and who taught him the names of trees, flowers,
and birds. But Goro did remember that after his
father finished a production the family would
celebrate with an eel dinner at a restaurant.
When he pestered his father for toys, Miyazaki
had shown him how to whittle instead—an
ability for which he was now grateful. It left
him with the feeling that no matter where he was
he could make something with his hands.
As driven as Miyazaki was, he did not achieve
fame overnight. He was in his late thirties by
the time he had his first directing
credit—for a Japanese TV series,
"Future Boy Conan," as it's called,
awkwardly, in English. And it wasn't until he
wrote the manga "Nausicäa of the Valley of
the Wind," and then received funding to make
it into a movie, that he became widely known.
Toshio Suzuki met Miyazaki in 1978, when Suzuki
was working as the editor of Animage, an
animation magazine. He had been assigned to
interview Miyazaki, but Miyazaki refused.
"So I showed up at the studio, without
phoning first, and Miyazaki ignored me,"
Suzuki told me. "He said only one thing:
'I'm busy. Go home.' I brought over a chair and
sat down next to him. He said, 'What are you
doing?' I said, 'I'm not going home until you say
something to me.' I sat there till late at night,
until he went home. The next day, I went back and
sat down in that same place. On the third night,
he finally spoke to me—to ask for advice. He
asked about whether there was a specific term for
this kind of car chase he was doing. I told him
what the name was; we talked about other things,
and after a while he consented to an interview.
But then we tried to take a photo. He didn't want
a photo. Only from the back. So I got pissed. I
ran the shot and I did a little caption for it:
'A very rare photo of the back of Hayao
Miyazaki's head.' That was my revenge. Starting
from that day, we've been working together for
twenty-five years, and I have seen him nearly
every day."
In 1985, Tokuma Shoten, the publishing company,
which had released the manga of
"Nausicäa," opened an anime studio,
Ghibli; Toshio Suzuki, Isao Takahata, and Hayao
Miyazaki became its directors. The name was
Miyazaki's choice; ghibli is a word that Italian
pilots once used to describe a wind blowing from
the Sahara. To Miyazaki, the name conveyed a
message, almost a threat—something like
"Let's blow a sensational wind through the
Japanese animation world," Suzuki recalled,
in a speech years later. The studio would produce
animation that, as Suzuki put it in his speech,
"illustrates the joys and sorrows of life as
they really are: and, as Miyazaki put it in the
Ghibli Museum catalogue, shows "how complex
the world is and how beautiful the world should
be."
Miyazaki threw himself into the project
single-mindedly. "He would work from nine to
four-thirty in the morning." Suzuki said.
"And he didn't take holidays. He changed
quite a bit when he turned fifty—he figured
maybe he should take off a Sunday now and then.
Now he tends to leave at midnight."
(Miyazaki told me, "I don't take long
vacations. I don't have the time. My idea of a
vacation is a nap.")
 Studio Ghibli's first
film was "Castle in the Sky" (1986), a
fable featuring a gutsy girl from another planet,
a gallant boy from a Welsh mining village, a
magical crystal pendant, and a variety of flying
machines that look like futuristic imaginings
from the nineteenth century. Neither it nor
"Totoro" nor "Grave of the
Fireflies" (1988)—an almost unbearably
sad film, directed by Takahata, about two
Japanese children fleeing fire-bombing raids in
the last days of the Second World War—did
well at the box office, though they received
great reviews. But the "Totoro"
characters had staying power: two years after the
film was released, Ghibli licensed the
merchandising of Totoro stuffed animals, and,
when sales took off, the studio was able to cover
any deficit in its production costs. And in 1989
the studio had its first hit, "Kiki's
Delivery Service." (The apprentice witch,
modeled on Suzuki's teen-age daughter, leaves her
family for a time to live in a coastal city in
Miyazaki's Europe, starting her own business
delivering parcels by broomstick.)
"Kiki" was seen by 2.6 million people,
becoming the most popular domestic movie in Japan
that year.
At that point, Miyazaki floated the idea of
disbanding the studio. "He felt that after
directing three films, made with the same group
of people, the human relationships had become too
tangled," Suzuki recalled. He eventually
convinced Miyazaki that closing shop would be a
mistake. (Suzuki is perhaps one of the few
people, if not the only person, who can talk
Miyazaki into anything. "He knows how to
handle Miyazaki," Takahata said. "He
knows that it's like dealing with a child: when
you want something, you say the opposite, because
you know he'll say no to your suggestion.")
The studio became successful to the point that
the staff was working on two projects at once.
Miyazaki, Suzuki recalled in his speech,
"came up with a proposition: Let's build a
new studio!" He went on, "It was the
Miyazaki way: when facing a problem, try to find
a break-through by coming up with a much bigger
problem."
The day I spoke with Suzuki, he was wearing black
jeans and a T-shirt, and was chain-smoking.
"Young people, unknown people with
aspirations—they are very pure, honest, and
so on," he said. "Miyazaki saw that I
was not that type, and he liked that."
Suzuki is the public face of Ghibli. He, not
Miyazaki, attended the Venice Film Festival, in
September, where "Howl's Moving Castle"
won an award for technical achievement. He's
funny and shrewd, and he fills in for the
interview-shy Miyazaki with flair. Suzuki told
me, "Just recently, Miyazaki-san came into
my room at night and we had a talk—just the
two of us. He said, with a very serious look,
'What are we going to do about Studio Ghibli?
There aren't many young talents out there.' He
said, 'I think I can do this another ten years.'
I said 'You can? Another ten years?' Japanese
fans tell him, 'Please keep making animation.'
I'm the only person in Japan who hopes he will
retire soon."
Takahata and Miyazaki, who worked together so
closely for years, have lately moved in different
directions. Takahata is more interested in
literary and film theory, more cerebral and less
enamored of magic. His films are not for
children, and "Grave of the Fireflies"
could easily have been a live-action film.
Takahata is sixty-nine, but he has a formidable
head of dark hair and a handsome, unwrinkled
face. "With Miyazaki, you have to totally
believe in the world of the film," Takahata
told me. "He is demanding that the audience
enter the world he has created completely. The
audience is being asked to surrender." He
paused. "I want the audience to have a
little distance. My relationship with him is
limited now. We are friends but we don't have a
direct working relationship."
For many viewers, of course, surrendering to
Miyazaki is a pleasure. Weeks after I saw
"Spirited Away," I was still thinking
of the scene in which Chihiro takes a train trip,
in the company of No Face, to seek out a witch
who may help her save her friend. The sequence is
both emotionally precise and fantastical. It's
like every solitary journey you've ever taken,
when you felt lonely and a little exalted, but it
is also deeply strange, for the train glides,
stately and surreal, over a translucent blue sea,
while the sky slowly ripples through the
possibilities of a sunset, from the pink of
crushed petals to a soft, forgiving black.
On the wall of one of the Studio Ghibli buildings
is a kind of joke about Miyazaki's fears of
invasion: two aluminum poles and two red hard
hats on pegs. The staff was free to borrow them,
Miyazaki explained to his colleagues, in order to
repel unwanted visitors. But during my visit to
the studio Steve Alpert, an American who heads
Ghibli's overseas division, showed me around, and
in an upstairs room I saw Miyazaki hanging out
with a couple of animators. He had shown the
completed "Howl's Moving Castle" to his
wife and the Ghibli staff that day. He was in a
relaxed mood, and when I started asking him
questions, through a translator, he started
answering.
Miyazaki's hair was parted on the side, and a
luxuriant hank of it fell over one eye
periodically, Veronica Lake style. He wore big
oblong glasses, gray slacks, a light-blue
short-sleeved shirt, and straw-soled sandals with
white socks. At first glance, he seemed full of
suppressed amusement—even jolly.
Today, Miyazaki announced cheerfully, marked the
last time that he would watch "Howl's Moving
Castle." "I never watch my films after
they've left the studio, because I've lived it
and I know exactly where I've made
mistakes," he said. "I'd have to sort
of cringe and hide, just close my eyes. 'Oh,
right, I remember that mistake, and that one.'
You don't have to go through that torment over
and over." The remark was punctuated with a
giddy, slightly maniacal laugh—more of a
giggle, really. In any case, he said, he was
already planning his next project: a short film
for the museum. "I have several I have to
make. What can I do? I have to keep feeding my
staff," he said, gesturing toward a group
that had gathered around us. "Look at all
the mouths I've got to feed here."
 I asked him what had
attracted him to "Howl's Moving
Castle." He said, "Sophie, the girl, is
given a spell and transformed into an old woman.
It would be a lie to say that turning young again
would mean living happily ever after. I didn't
want to say that. I didn't want to make it seem
like turning old was such a bad thing—the
idea was that maybe she'll have learned something
by being old for a while, and, when she actually
is old, make a better grandma. Anyway, as Sophie
gets older, she gets more pep. And she says
what's on her mind. She is transformed from a
shy, mousy little girl into a blunt, honest
woman. It's not a motif you see often, and,
especially with an old woman taking up the whole
screen, it's a big theatrical risk. But it's a
delusion that being young means you're
happy." |
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