2024-01-17 04:21:25
“Reality is for people with a lack of imagination,” thinks Hayao Miyazaki.
Foto: ASSOCIATED PRESS – Chris Pizzello
In 2018, just seconds following finishing a farewell speech, Hayao Miyazaki’s voice broke. He might not contain his tears and the microphone, which he had in front of him, amplified his pain. Standing, she held a paper in his hands. “I will never forget that day I met you at the stop following the rain 55 years ago,” were his final words to an audience dressed in black. He also dressed like them: black suit, tie and white shirt. His beard, hair and even eyebrows revealed his age, the transition from youth to old age. Regardless of the passage of time, the memories still remained intact, recorded like a still photograph. The face of his friend Isao Takahata accompanied him. He predicted that he would live to be 95 years old, but he had to fire him 13 years earlier: at 82. Together they shared the nervousness and nausea resulting from being in charge of the animators’ union at the Toei Animatio studio: he, as general secretary, and Takahata, as vice president. . They found relief in the nightly talks, where they expressed their dissatisfaction with what they did daily: “We wanted to do deeper work, of which we would be proud.” They did it or at least they tried: on June 15, 1985 they founded Studio Ghibli.
When Takahata was still alive, Hayao Miyazaki only trusted his eyes to know how good or bad his films were. Both developed a career as filmmakers, especially from their own animation studio, which Toshio Suzuki joined as producer and founder. Grave of the Fireflies was the first feature film that Takahata directed with Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki preceded him with two film titles under that studio: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky. Over the years, the two expanded their filmography. In the case of Takahata, he had enough time for four more films: Memories of Yesterday, Pompoko, My Neighbors the Yamadas and The Tale of Princess Kaguya. Meanwhile, Miyazaki continues to build his body of work, which includes films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, The Amazing Hobo Castle, The Wind Rises, The Boy and the Heron, among others. Perhaps with the latest film the time has come to say goodbye to film creation.
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Stepping aside was an announcement made by Hayao Miyazaki himself. However, it is not the first time that he says that he is leaving, but in the end he keeps returning to the same path, as he has done since 1998, the first time he stated that he would stop making films. The Wind Rises (2013) would be his last feature film, but following 10 years he returned with one more: The Boy and the Heron. He always returns because he feels like making another film and because he is plagued by contradictions, as he admitted in 1995, comparing himself to his father. He has brought human contradictions to his cinema with characters who move between good and evil, because, as he recognized in 2021 for The New York Times, he is not “a god who decides what is good and bad. “Humans make mistakes.”
The Boy and the Heron | Subtitled Trailer
He grew up seeing the flaws of his father, whom he even called a scammer one day. During World War II, that man served as the director of Miyazaki Airplane, a munitions factory that produced parts for the A6M Zero fighter planes. Apparently, as Miyazaki noted, his father “bribed officials to accept defective parts.” He had to carry that past that he did not share. Then he brought the war to his films and his passion for airplanes, which perhaps arose from that factory that he never set foot in and despite the fact that aircraft marked a childhood event crossed by flames.
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In 1945, Miyazaki was four years old when a light surprised him through his window. The flash threatened to destroy everything around him. The culprits were the American planes that bombed Utsunomiya, the Japanese city where he lived. He sought refuge under a bridge, until he and his father headed to a truck that would help them leave all that behind. But he was never able to do it and he even recounted that episode in the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.
Before cinema, Hayao Miyazaki explored art through drawing, a skill that was admired by his classmates and became his means of communication given his shyness. He came to manga during his high school studies and at some point in his life he decided that he wanted to follow that path for his artistic career. He then learned regarding animation and wanted to articulate both to his life. As for his ideology, he once felt identified with Marxism, but over the years he changed his mind, as he confessed in 1994, according to The New York Times. “No matter what class people are born into, idiots are still idiots and good people are still good.” Three years ago for that same newspaper he stated that several things might be learned from Marxist ideas, but he accepted a reality regarding any world philosophy: that none “would allow us all to live happily.”
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His influences in animation have been far from Disney, as he hates their films and even in 1988 he revealed that he considered those feature films “show nothing but contempt for the public.” He then noticed films such as The King and the Nightingale, by Paul Grimault, and The Snow Queen, by Lev Atamanov. A few years ago he had the intention of recording with a video camera what was happening on the street while he was driving, as shown in the documentary 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki. “It is in the images of every ordinary day where I want to discover the extraordinary (…). I can’t sit at my desk. “Ideas come from the unexpected.”
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