Internationally acclaimed animator and creator of numerous fantastic worlds.
January 5, 1941
Writer, animator, and film director Hayao Miyazaki has spent his career creating fantastic and wondrous worlds for a global audience. His films depict pastoral, sometimes utopian landscapes and celebrate nature, flight, imagination, and the simple joys of childhood.
He began his animation career in 1963 working as a concept artist, in-between artist, and storyboard artist, working his way up to directing for television. He directed his first feature film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, in 1979. In 1984 he founded Studio Ghibli, proceeding to produce a string of successful films such as Castle in the Sky (1986), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001).
Between 1982 and 1994 Miyazaki wrote and drew the manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an epic story set approximately one thousand years in the future, in a time when the Earth is recovering from a war that left the landscape ravaged and strangely altered. The heroine, Princess Nausicaä, is a brave young woman called upon to lead her small nation. She is the first of a series of strong heroines created by Miyazaki such as Satsuki in My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), and Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), among many others.
Miyazaki garnered international acclaim with Princess Mononoke, which won the Picture of the Year Japanese Academy Award, a Nebula Award for Best Script, and numerous others. Spirited Away claimed the Best Animated Film Academy Award in the United States. In 2005 the Venice Film Festival awarded him a lifetime achievement award.
Photo credit: © Armando Gallo/Corbis