Moving into a tiny nearby apartment, he worked as an in-between artist on the feature-length anime, Watchdog Bow Wow, and the made-for-TV anime Wolf Boy Ken. “When I saw Hakujaden,” he said, “it was as if the scales fell from my eyes I realised that I should depict the honesty and goodness of children in my work With that as my starting point, I have spent the last 20 years trying to do this.” Watchdog Bow Wow and early Toei Animation workĪfter leaving university in 1963, Miyazaki went to work at Toei Animation – the studio whose Tale of the White Serpent had sparked his fascination with anime.
Read more: 10 Great Fantasy Anime Movies not From Studio Ghibli
Miyazaki admitted as much in a lecture he gave in 1982, reproduced in his superb book, Starting Point. But there are also moments of beauty in it, and the seeds of what Miyazaki would bring to his own work: a sense of childlike innocence and a lightness of touch. “I was hooked when I saw Hakujaden,” Miyazaki wrote in a 1979 essay, “and I wound up choosing to become an animator because of it.”Ĭompared to later Japanese animated features, The Tale of the White Serpent is somewhat stilted, both technically and in terms of storytelling, and clearly influenced by Disney. But he remained dedicated to pursuing a career in manga even as he read and wrote about Japanese industry, and started up a manga club at his university (Gakushuin Daigaku in Tokyo) and began approaching publishers with some of his early work.Īs for animation, there was one cinematic experience that, more than any other, seemed to trigger Miyazaki’s filmmaking ambitions – it was one of the first steps on his path to becoming one of the most celebrated animators of all time. When he went to university, however, Miyazaki studied political science and economics rather than the arts. Miyazaki grew up in the post-war comics boom led by the father of manga, Osamu Tezuka, and dreamed of becoming a comic artist himself. Somehow, his films managed to be both universal and deeply personal. But how did Miyazaki, born to a well-to-do family on January 5th, 1941, become one of the most respected animators in Japan? Through such films as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki entertained and beguiled a global audience with his lighter-than-air storytelling and captivating characters. When Hayao Miyazaki stepped into a Tokyo conference room and announced his retirement from feature filmmaking on September 6th, 2013, it marked the end of a career which stretched back to the early 1960s.
0 kommentar(er)
