stay for the credits

March 15th
11:18

73 notes

Hayao Miyazaki (22 years old)

“What my friends and I have been trying to do since the 1970’s is to try and quiet things down a little bit; don’t just bombard them with noise and distraction. And to follow the path of children’s emotions and feelings as we make a film. If you stay true to joy and astonishment and empathy you don’t have to have violence and you don’t have to have action. They’ll follow you. This is our principle.

“In a way now, live action is becoming part of that whole soup called animation. Animation has become a word that encompasses so much, and my animation is just a little tiny dot over in the corner. It’s plenty for me.” (via)

11:01

29 notes

"I believe nostalgia has many appearances and that it’s not just the privilege of adults. An adult can feel nostalgia for a specific time in their lives, but I think children too can have nostalgia. It’s one of mankind’s most shared emotions. It’s one of the things that makes us human, which is what makes it difficult to define. It was when I saw the film Nostalghia by Tarkovsky that I realised that nostalgia is universal. Even though we use it in Japan, the word ‘nostalgia’ is not a Japanese word. The fact that I can understand that film even though I don’t speak a foreign language means that nostalgia is something we all share. When you live, you lose things. It’s a fact of life. So it’s natural for everyone to have nostalgia."

— Hayao Miyazaki.

10:53

24 notes

"While you’re thinking and thinking, your brain looks for wording, the surface. What you have to do is keep thinking and working hard and you break through, falling through into the complete darkness. Only then, will you be able to see the light, open your mind, open your heart and see your images…I take it for granted…Sometimes the filmmaker falls into the old trap that they’re very much afraid that the audience will become bored. You should not be defeated by that threat. That’s why the American films are too much in the face, rather than keeping space. We do not have to speed up the tempo to make the audience involved in the film. As long as you really tap into the children’s feelings and try to get the real essence, you will never lose their patience."

— Hayao Miyazaki.

February 16th
21:13

4,591 notes

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Via

cuntcina:

“Miyazaki taps a cigarette from a silver case. The Disney deal suits him, he explains, because he has stuck to his guns. His refusal to grant merchandising rights means that there is no chance of any Nausicaa happy meals or Spirited Away video games. Furthermore, Disney wields no creative control. There is a rumour that when Harvey Weinstein was charged with handling the US release of Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki sent him a samurai sword in the post. Attached to the blade was a stark message: “No cuts.”

The director chortles. “Actually, my producer did that. Although I did go to New York to meet this man, this Harvey Weinstein, and I was bombarded with this aggressive attack, all these demands for cuts.” He smiles. “I defeated him.””

—

Xan Brooks for The Guardian, September 2005 [x] (via oreides)

Looks like Miyazaki and his producers are fully aware of the U.S. and Disney’s business of meddling with the works of foreign production.

(via anhyobin)

This is the most beautiful thing I have ever read.

June 29th
14:01

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giraffegiraf:

Aaaah this blogger recreated several dishes seen in Miyazaki’s films and it all looks AMAZING. You can find the series here.

June 26th
16:20

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Via

“Fujimoto wasn’t a villian per se. The harder a father tries, the more he drives a daughter away. I think that’s how today’s Japanese fathers are; most fathers suppress their emotions… beneath social responsibilities. It’s almost pathetic to Ponyo. Not even his noble ideals can reach his daughter. That’s the life we fathers must lead, you know?”

- Hayao Miyazaki

February 18th
21:24

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"Youth isn’t just about running pell-mell at the sun yelling, ‘Damn it all to hell!’ Youth is about asking yourself who you are, what you can accomplish. It is about fervently drawing pictures every day, on the one hand thinking, ‘They’re all right, I’ve got something here,’ and on the other hand wondering if your work will be accepted by others, and worrying that it may all be an illusion and that you really don’t have any talent at all. This anguish in the midst of uncertainty and impatience is what youth is all about."

— Hayao Miyazaki (via corcordium)

January 6th
00:10

45 notes

Via

graceyu:

miyazaki menswear

July 5th
16:52

42 notes

Via

"Watching Miyazaki’s movies, one gets the sense of humankind (and its fantastical stand-ins) as creatures in a permanent state of evolution, able to transform from year to year, week to week, even moment to moment. In Miyazaki’s work, people are what they choose to be, but they’re also what other people have decided they are — and the tension between those two definitions (plus the complicating factor of characters not having a strong sense of themselves, much less knowing what they want from life) makes Miyazaki’s features more complex than almost anything being made in the American studio system, animated or live action."

—

Matt Zoller Seitz’s praise for Miyazaki really nails why his films are so good and yet so different from most.

Seitz wrote this as part of his Directors of the Decade feature on Salon, and each of the eleven entries is just as excellent.

(via gregbrown)

June 16th
22:12

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"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 is actually 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 to 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."

—

Hayao Miyazaki, on what attracted him to Howl’s Moving Castle.

The Auteur of Anime by Margaret Talbot: “The New Yorker” (January 17th, 2005)

(via hayao-miyazaki) (via bricorama)

January 5th
11:44

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"I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldn’t stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind and of the imagination. Those things can help us in life. But we have to be cautious in using this word fantasy. In Japan, the word fantasy these days is applied to everything from TV shows to video games, like virtual reality. But virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people. It’s a dilemma I struggle with in my work, that balance between imaginary worlds and virtual worlds."

— Hayao Miyazaki, on the necessity of fantasy in children’s stories.

11:39

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Spirited Away’s lead character Chihiro seems to be a different type of heroine than the female leads in your previous films. She is less obviously heroic, and we don’t get to know much about her motivation or background.

HAYAO MIYAZAKI: I haven’t chosen to just make the character of Chihiro likes this, it’s because there are many young girls in Japan right now who are like that. They are more and more insensitive to the efforts that their parents are making to keep them happy. There’s a scene in which Chihiro doesn’t react when her father calls her name. It’s only after the second time he calls that she replies. Many of my staff told me to make it three times instead of two, because that’s what many girls are like these days. They don’t immediately react to the call of the parents. What made me decide to make this film was the realisation that there are no films made for that age group of ten-year old girls. It was through observing the daughter of a friend that I realised there were no films out there for her, no films that directly spoke to her. Certainly, girls like her see films that contain characters their age, but they can’t identify with them, because they are imaginary characters that don’t resemble them at all.

With Spirited Away I wanted to say to them “don’t worry, it will be alright in the end, there will be something for you”, not just in cinema, but also in everyday life. For that it was necessary to have a heroine who was an ordinary girl, not someone who could fly or do something impossible. Just a girl you can encounter everywhere in Japan. Every time I wrote or drew something concerning the character of Chihiro and her actions, I asked myself the question whether my friend’s daughter or her friends would be capable of doing it. That was my criteria for every scene in which I gave Chihiro another task or challenge. Because it’s through surmounting these challenges that this little Japanese girl becomes a capable person. It took me three years to make this film, so now my friend’s daughter is thirteen years old rather than ten, but she still loved the film and that made me very happy.