Hayao Miyazaki

Exploring the Early Work of Japan's Greatest Animator

Raz Greenberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501335952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Animación

Hayao Miyazaki's career in animation has made him famous as not only the greatest director of animated features in Japan, the man behind classics as My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and Spirited Away (2001), but also as one of the most influential animators in the world, providing inspiration for animators in Disney, Pixar, Aardman, and many other leading studios. However, the animated features directed by Miyazaki represent only a portion of his 50-year career. Hayao Miyazaki examines his earliest projects in detail, alongside the works of both Japanese and non-Japanese animators and comics artists that Miyazaki encountered throughout his early career, demonstrating how they all contributed to the familiar elements that made Miyazaki's own films respected and admired among both the Japanese and the global audience.

Chapter 1

FROM FAN TO PROFESSIONAL

In 1958, at the age of 17, Hayao Miyazaki saw the film that changed his life. It was the film that led him to a career in animation, a career that would make him Japan’s (and one of the world’s) most acclaimed and influential animators, known as the director of such classics as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and the Academy Award winner Spirited Away (2001), as well as a source of inspiration for leading animation studios all over the world, such as the American studio Pixar and the British studio Aardman, among many others. The film that set Miyazaki on this path was Hakujaden (literally translated as Legend of the White Serpent and later distributed in English-speaking territories under the title Panda and the Magic Serpent).

Miyazaki was not, by any means, the only spectator on whom Panda and the Magic Serpent has left such a deep impression. The film was the first Japanese feature-length animated color film, and its commercial success hinted of Japan’s future as an animation superpower. Yet the great influence that the film had on Miyazaki is noteworthy, especially since it was hardly his first exposure to animation or popular illustrations.

Born in 1941 to a well-to-do family that owned an airplane-rudders factory that thrived both during and after the war, Miyazaki had developed his passion for flight and airplanes from an early age, a passion evident in almost all of his films. Another significant childhood experience that influenced Miyazaki was his mother falling ill with spinal tuberculosis, and the threat of orphanhood became an important theme in his later work. Above all, Miyazaki’s formative years were marked by the flourishing of Japan’s manga (comics) industry, which offered a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for Japan’s young readers in the difficult early years of the post-war era.¹

The artist whose success has become synonymous with the rise of the manga industry is Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989). Tezuka, who had had a passion for comics, animation, and drawing since he was a child, began his professional career as a manga artist after the war ended while studying medicine at Osaka University. Though he completed his studies, it was obvious that he was destined for a manga artist’s career: in 1947 his book Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island), a graphic novel inspired by western adventure novels and films, sold an unprecedented number of 400,000 copies, and became the first of many classic titles Tezuka would produce in the following four decades.² Characters created by Tezuka, such as the boy-robot Tetsuwan Atom (known in English-speaking countries as Astro Boy) and the brave lion Leo (known in English-speaking countries as Kimba the White Lion), remain leading figures in Japanese popular culture to this day, and they were also the first protagonists of Japanese comics to find an audience in the west through the animated adaptations of their adventures.

Tezuka’s success inspired many imitators, and his style soon became recognized as the one many people associate with “manga” to this very day: cinematic storytelling, featuring the breaking of single actions into several panels, successive pages that focused on visual storytelling that feature little or no text, and most notably the characters’ design—round, “cute” characters with big saucer-eyes. One didn’t have to look very far to find Tezuka’s sources of inspiration for this design: a fan of the animated films by Walt Disney and his greatest competitors, brothers Max and David Fleischer, Tezuka’s models for drawing characters were Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop.³

Tezuka was not the first Japanese artist to draw in this style either: during the war, Japanese animators drew in a style that closely mimicked the work of American animation studios—especially Disney’s and the Fleischers’—aware of the popularity of this style among the Japanese audience. Japan’s most ambitious propaganda epics produced during the war directed by Mitsuyo Seo (1911–2010), Momotarō no Umiwashi (released 1943, the official English title of the 2008 release by Zakka films is Momotarō’s Sea Eagle) and Japan’s first feature-length animated film Momotarō no Umi no Shinpei (released in 1945, the official English title of the 2017 release by Funimation is Momotarō: Sacred Sailors), also show the strong influence of American animated productions. Both films carried a strong nationalistic anti-western sentiment: the titular character, a brave demon-fighting boy from one of Japan’s most beloved children’s fables, was presented in the film as a sponsor of Japan’s colonialism in east-Asia, who both leads Japan’s animal army in war against the hated western superpowers and protects the native animal inhabitants of an Asian jungle from the greedy ambitions of the same superpowers, also educating these inhabitants in the ways of Japan’s modern achievements. But it was impossible to mistake the inspiration for both films’ character designs for anything other than American animation—Momotarō’s Sea Eagle even featured Bluto from the Fleischer brothers’ Popeye cartoons as the useless commander of Pearl Harbor, and the character also had a small cameo in Momotarō: Sacred Sailors. Tezuka claimed that watching Momotarō: Sacred Sailors was a major source of inspiration for his own work.⁴

Through Tezuka’s works, Miyazaki experienced his first anxiety of influence. His first attempts of drawing manga, at the age of 18, were compared by people who saw them to Tezuka’s style. Miyazaki, who at first denied any such influence, eventually realized that his early works were indeed inspired by Tezuka, and this realization was somewhat traumatic: he collected all of his initial sketches, and burned them.⁵ This incident started a rivalry of sorts between Tezuka and Miyazaki—a one-sided rivalry, for the most part,⁶ which focused on Miyazaki’s attempts to shake off Tezuka’s influence, find other sources of inspiration, and develop his own style.

Miyazaki found an alternative to Tezuka’s influence in another manga artist, Tetsuji Fukushima (1914–1992).⁷ All but forgotten today, Fukushima was a successful artist in the 1950s, whose flagship series Sabaku no Maō (Devil of the Desert) was an epic swashbuckling adventure with an Arabian Nights flavor set in a modern environment, spreading across no fewer than nine volumes. Like Tezuka, Fukushima found most of his inspiration in American illustrations, but he turned his creative attention to the less cartoony and more serious works on the other side of the Pacific: his realistic style bore more resemblance to Milton Caniff’s newspaper adventure strips than it did to Walt Disney’s cartoons. The epic scope of the story along with the richly detailed designs of exotic landscapes and especially vehicles (cars, tanks, and airplanes) have been noted by Miyazaki as a long-standing influence on his own work, one that surpassed that of Tezuka.

Miyazaki also had first-hand access to foreign animation and comics—of the American kind that influenced Tezuka and Fukushima, at least. American comics were regularly brought into post-war Japan by American soldiers, and with the re-opening of the Japanese film market to American films, American animation—especially Disney features—literally flooded the theatres. And although by the late 1940s the Fleischer brothers were no longer running their studio (it was taken over by their main financier, Paramount, and produced inferior works under the new name Famous Studios), a new generation of young Japanese was just discovering their work; their 1939 feature-length adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s satire Gulliver’s Travels became the first foreign animated feature screened in Japanese theatres after the war⁸ and a large volume of their short films—Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman cartoons—was sold for broadcast on Japanese television in the mid-1950s.⁹ The Fleischer brothers have been another strong influence on Miyazaki, and he seems to have aspired to draw influence from the essence and themes of their work, while avoiding superficial design similarities to their films of the kind that typified Tezuka’s manga.

Then came Panda and the Magic Serpent. Like Tezuka’s and Fukushima’s work, it did not come out of nowhere; in fact, the film’s roots in the history of Japanese animation and Japan’s visual tradition go far deeper than the works of both artists. Panda and the Magic Serpent was produced by Tōei Animation, a studio established in 1948 under the name Nihon Dōga (Japan Animation) by some of Japan’s veteran animators, including Kenzō Masaoka (1898–1988) who pioneered the use of synchronized sound in Japanese animated productions in the mid-1930s, and especially Sanae Yamamoto (1898–1981).¹⁰ Yamamoto, who by the late 1940s was Japan’s oldest practicing animator, started his career in 1924, directing the first Japanese animated adaptation of a western story, the Aesop fable Tortoise and the Hare. From there he moved on to a highly eclectic career that included folktale adaptations, educational films for schools, and wartime propaganda.¹¹ Yamamoto’s works as an animator show a strong influence from traditional Japanese painting and European animation, notably the work of German cutout animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981), renowned for the silhouette-aesthetic of her films. By the time Nihon Dōga was founded, Yamamoto had largely left the creative side of animation production to focus on his administrative duties, but his high-brow artistic approach is definitely felt in the studio’s early productions.

Attending a screening of Hakujaden (titled Panda and the Magic Serpent in English) at the age of 17 left a deep impression on Miyazaki, inspiring him later to seek a career in animation. He was especially impressed with the film’s portrayal of a strong woman as the protagonist.

As production in Nihon Dōga grew, younger talent was recruited. Two rising stars in the studio, Yasuji Mori and Yasuo Ōtsuka, would become Miyazaki’s mentors, and in many respects it can be argued that they have shaped his ideal perception of animation. Mori (1925–1992), a graduate of design studies, was drawn to animation after being impressed with Masaoka’s 1943 musical animated short The Spider and the Tulip. He began his career at Nihon Dōga while still working as a commercial artist designing stores, trained under Masaoka himself, and held both jobs until the studio was bought by Tōei and could provi...