Hayao Miyazaki: the films that outlasted every farewell he ever made

Hayao Miyazaki

Photo: Oliver Ayala / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 5, 1941 Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Filmmaker and animator
Known for	Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke
Awards	3 Academy Award · Golden Bear

There is a paradox at the center of Hayao Miyazaki’s career that his fans have grown comfortable ignoring. He has spent decades arguing, publicly and forcefully, that animation is in decline — that the industry he helped shape is now populated by people who cannot draw human beings because they do not know any. He has watched digital production replace the hand-drawn cells he considers the medium’s soul. He has announced, with evident sincerity, that he is done. And then he has gone back to his studio, sat down at his desk, and drawn the next film. Frame by frame, by hand, as he has always done.

He grew up in Tokyo during and after the Second World War, the second of four sons in a family whose livelihood was entangled with the very machinery he would later critique. His father ran Miyazaki Airplane, a factory that manufactured rudders for Zero fighter planes. The beautiful, terrible efficiency of those aircraft — the gap between the elegance of their design and the violence of their purpose — would surface four decades later in The Wind Rises, his most autobiographically inflected film. His mother spent years hospitalized with tuberculosis while he was a child; this shaped his relationship to illness, vulnerability, and the fragility of domestic warmth, all of which recur in his films as quietly as furniture in a room.

At Gakushūin University, he studied political science and economics, and joined the manga club. Animation found him before theory did: he joined Toei Animation in 1963 as an in-betweener, the least visible role in the production chain, tracing completed frames to fill the movement between them. It was there he met Isao Takahata, the director who would become his closest collaborator and, eventually, his co-founder at Studio Ghibli. Their partnership was not the one of equals that retrospectives tend to imply — Miyazaki animated, Takahata directed, and the two men pushed each other toward more ambitious work than either might have made alone.

By 1978, Miyazaki was directing himself, and the television series Future Boy Conan showed audiences what his sensibility looked like in charge: ecological catastrophe, a boy running toward something, and a female character at the moral center of the story. The Castle of Cagliostro followed in 1979. Then, in 1984, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind — adapted from his own manga — announced his visual language fully formed: poisoned earth, a warrior who refuses to be only a warrior, the weight of industrial civilization pressing down on what remained of the natural world. He was forty-three. He had not yet founded Studio Ghibli, which he did the following year with Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki.

The studio’s early run produced Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988) — the film that gave Japan its most recognizable cultural mascot and the rest of the world a way of understanding what children see in the dark — and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). Princess Mononoke arrived in 1997 and displaced E.T. to become the highest-grossing Japanese film at the time of its release. It was also his most uncompromising: a war between industrial civilization and the gods of the forest, in which neither side is wrong and neither is permitted to survive unchanged. He announced he was retiring after completing it. He did not retire.

Spirited Away opened in Japan in 2001 and became, for nearly two decades, the highest-grossing Japanese film in history. At the 75th Academy Awards in 2003, it became the first animated film not produced in the English language to win Best Animated Feature, a distinction it still holds. What critics noted at the time — and what holds up — is that the film’s power comes not from spectacle but from labor. Its protagonist, Chihiro, does not become special. She does not discover hidden powers. She works, and pays attention, and refuses to forget who she is.

The reception of The Wind Rises (2013) exposed the limits of what audiences were willing to hold alongside Miyazaki’s beauty. The film is a biographical fantasy about Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer who designed the Mitsubishi Zero — the aircraft that would kill tens of thousands of airmen and civilians across the Pacific. Miyazaki was not interested in exculpation. He was interested in the question of what it means to give your life to something magnificent that becomes an instrument of destruction. Japanese nationalist groups protested the film for its references to the war’s victims; Western critics accused it of glorifying militarism; pacifist organizations objected to its portrayal of the engineer as dreamer rather than collaborator. Miyazaki’s response was to note that he himself was the son of a man who built warplane parts, and that this did not resolve the question. It was the only answer there was.

After The Wind Rises and an Honorary Academy Award in 2014, his retirement lasted roughly five years before Studio Ghibli acknowledged he was working again. The Boy and the Heron, developed in near-total secrecy and released in Japan in July 2023, arrived internationally with almost no advance marketing. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 96th ceremony in March 2024 and the Golden Globe for the same category. At the time of writing, he is 85, confirmed by Studio Ghibli to be working on another feature — described as a nostalgic action-adventure story — at the same desk, in the same studio, with the same pencil.

He has been married since 1965 to Akemi Ōta, an animator he met at Toei. Their elder son, Goro Miyazaki, became a director at Studio Ghibli. The domestic arrangement of their life together surfaces in his films not as subject matter but as atmosphere: the specific warmth of a household that is functional, lived-in, and not performing happiness.

In March 2026, Studio Ghibli unveiled the Panorama Box, a series of three-dimensional dioramas transforming scenes from his greatest films into architectural models, on display at the Ghibli Grand Warehouse from July. He is not reviewing his archive. He is building something new out of it. The next film has no release window. It will take however long it takes.

Featured Films

Tags: Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Studio Ghibli

Featured News — Hayao Miyazaki

Film festivals

The Award Winners of The 80th Venice Film Festival

Film festivals

Hayao Miyazaki to open with his latest film ‘Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka / The Boy and the Heron’ at the 71st San Sebastian Festival

See all →

Related People

Jennifer Lopez

Dakota Johnson

Juliette Binoche

Zack Snyder

Ken Watanabe

Ricky Gervais