Hayao Miyazaki is the director, animator, and co-founder of Studio Ghibli responsible for the studio's most internationally recognised works. From Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) to The Boy and the Heron (2023), his features have been the principal vehicle by which feature-length anime reached non-Japanese cinema audiences.
Career before Ghibli
Miyazaki joined Toei Doga in 1963 as an in-betweener and progressed through key animation and direction roles across the late 1960s and 1970s, including extensive work on television series (Heidi, Girl of the Alps, 1974; Future Boy Conan, 1978) and the 1979 theatrical film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. His own manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, serialised in Animage from 1982, became the basis of his 1984 feature debut as director.
Studio Ghibli
After Nausicaä, Miyazaki and Isao Takahata co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 with producer Toshio Suzuki. The studio's output through the late 1980s and 1990s — Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away — is now the international canon of feature anime.
Spirited Away (2001) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and remains the only non-English-language film to do so. The Boy and the Heron (2023) won the same award in 2024.
Method
- Storyboards drawn personally, often without a completed screenplay; production proceeds as the boards are completed.
- Backgrounds painted in detail to allow the camera to linger; landscape itself is treated as a character.
- Recurring themes: aviation, the relationship between technology and the natural world, child protagonists with agency, and ambivalent rather than evil antagonists.
- A preference for 2D-cel-derived techniques even after digital production became standard, with deliberately limited use of CGI.