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 Japanâs (and one of the worldâs) 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 Japanâs 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, Miyazakiâs formative years were marked by the flourishing of Japanâs manga (comics) industry, which offered a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for Japanâs 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 (1928â1989). 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 artistâs 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.
Tezukaâs success inspired many imitators, and his style soon became recognized as the one many people associate with âmangaâ 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 charactersâ designâround, âcuteâ characters with big saucer-eyes. One didnât have to look very far to find Tezukaâs sources of inspiration for this design: a fan of the animated films by Walt Disney and his greatest competitors, brothers Max and David Fleischer, Tezukaâs 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 studiosâespecially Disneyâs and the Fleischersââaware of the popularity of this style among the Japanese audience. Japanâs most ambitious propaganda epics produced during the war directed by Mitsuyo Seo (1911â2010), MomotarĆ no Umiwashi (released 1943, the official English title of the 2008 release by Zakka films is MomotarĆâs Sea Eagle) and Japanâs first feature-length animated film MomotarĆ no Umi no Shinpei (released in 1945, the official English title of the 2017 release by Funimation is MomotarĆ: 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 Japanâs most beloved childrenâs fables, was presented in the film as a sponsor of Japanâs colonialism in east-Asia, who both leads Japanâs 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 Japanâs modern achievements. But it was impossible to mistake the inspiration for both filmsâ character designs for anything other than American animationâMomotarĆâs Sea Eagle even featured Bluto from the Fleischer brothersâ Popeye cartoons as the useless commander of Pearl Harbor, and the character also had a small cameo in MomotarĆ: Sacred Sailors. Tezuka claimed that watching MomotarĆ: Sacred Sailors was a major source of inspiration for his own work.4
Through Tezukaâs 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 Tezukaâs 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 Miyazakiâa one-sided rivalry, for the most part,6 which focused on Miyazakiâs attempts to shake off Tezukaâs influence, find other sources of inspiration, and develop his own style.
Miyazaki found an alternative to Tezukaâs influence in another manga artist, Tetsuji Fukushima (1914â1992).7 All but forgotten today, Fukushima was a successful artist in the 1950s, whose flagship series Sabaku no MaĆ (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 Caniffâs newspaper adventure strips than it did to Walt Disneyâs 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 comicsâof 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 animationâespecially Disney featuresâliterally 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 Swiftâs satire Gulliverâs Travels became the first foreign animated feature screened in Japanese theatres after the war8 and a large volume of their short filmsâBetty Boop, Popeye and Superman cartoonsâwas 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 Tezukaâs manga.
Then came Panda and the Magic Serpent. Like Tezukaâs and Fukushimaâs work, it did not come out of nowhere; in fact, the filmâs roots in the history of Japanese animation and Japanâs visual tradition go far deeper than the works of both artists. Panda and the Magic Serpent was produced by TĆei Animation, a studio established in 1948 under the name Nihon DĆga (Japan Animation) by some of Japanâs veteran animators, including KenzĆ Masaoka (1898â1988) who pioneered the use of synchronized sound in Japanese animated productions in the mid-1930s, and especially Sanae Yamamoto (1898â1981).10 Yamamoto, who by the late 1940s was Japanâs 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 Yamamotoâs 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 (1899â1981), renowned for the silhouette-aesthetic of her films. By the time Nihon DĆga 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 studioâs 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 filmâs portrayal of a strong woman as the protagonist.
As production in Nihon DĆga grew, younger talent was recruited. Two rising stars in the studio, Yasuji Mori and Yasuo Ćtsuka, would become Miyazakiâs mentors, and in many respects it can be argued that they have shaped his ideal perception of animation. Mori (1925â1992), a graduate of design studies, was drawn to animation after being impressed with Masaokaâs 1943 musical animated short The Spider and the Tulip. He began his career at Nihon DĆga while still working as a commercial artist designing stores, trained under Masaoka himself, and held both jobs until the studio was bought by TĆei and could provi...