Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki is the best known of the post-war animators who started out at either Tezuka's Mushi studios or the large Toei animation company. Best known as a manga writer-artist with many publications to his credit- Nausicaa: Valley Of The Wind is his best known - Miyazaki has often worked in tandem with another animator-director, Isao Takahata, who has produced some of his films. Miyazaki in turn produced Takahata's Only Yesterday (aka Falling Tears Of Yesterday) 991 and Heisei Tanuki War PonPoko (1994) Each has his own graphic style, mode of characterisation and directorial preoccupations and obviously their working relationship aids each to achieve his artistic intentions. While Takahata's work is highly naturalistic and usually contemporaneous, Miyazaki's subjects (often thinly-veiled socio-political allegories) are set in bizarre mish-mashes of worlds plucked from European history books. Nonetheless Miyazaki's films are uniquely Japanese in their eclectic approach to style. He opens up possibilities for animated features to engage audiences in emotionally charged yet seriously contemplative works of fiction.

Miyazaki's central characters have almost exclusively been children or   teenagers, often girls. Miyazaki's characters behave astutely and with an assured maturity. I once heard someone say that Lisa in The Simpsons is unrealistic, because a girl her age wouldn't be so aware. The eponymous character of Nausicaa (1983) is not unlike Lisa, except that unlike her American counterpart, Nausicaa is allowed to play the role of heroine tactician and arbitrator in a territorial feud between warring clans. The figure of the sensitive yet strong-willed female teen recurs in Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), the story of a young witch reaching puberty, sent from her home to work and learn about humans.

The style of animation in both Nausicaa and Kiki's Delivery Service is considerably removed from the preceding decade of robot-fixated scenarios. Miyazaki transforms gleaming high-tech space settings into organic 'old worlds' and the pacing and attention to minor detail is distinctive. This is clear in the luscious and lingering foret scenes of Nausicaa and the languid, moving billowing clouds in Kiki's Delivery Service. Miyazaki's

films are not just about contemplative figures and moments: the films themselves induce contemplative states, often transporting the viewer into the mood, mind and memory of the character. With its remarkably realistic dynamic movement, Miyazaki's work can shift with ease from still passages to giddy, vertiginous sequences. The chase scenes in Laputa (1986) have often been cited as simulating live action footage, while the sensation of flight features in this film and in Nausicaa, Kiki's Delivery Service and Porco Rosso (1992).

What typifies Miyazaki as a director working beyond the 1970s Japanese animation, with its frenetic combinations of 2001:A Space Odyssey musings,

Star Wars action and Bandai toys, is the way he figures apocalyptic symbolism in his narratives. The best example occurs in  My Neighbor Totoro (1988). After children have discovered the existence of a magical spirit-being in the garden of their new country house, Totoro performs a fun ritual which demonstrates his powers. By sheer force of will, he directs some freshly planted seeds to grow. Building up energy, he conjures the fledgling shafts into a towering tree which burts out of the ground in an orgasmic rush of lush vegetation. Frighteningly, the image of  the tree looks identical to the infamous "mushroom cloud" of an atomic detonation, and the excited children giggle with glee. This image in Totoro is simultaneously breath-taking, heart warming and haunting. Once again the frailty of an ecology is posed locally - Japan is accustomed to earthquakes - and globally, since the sky castle is a succinct symbol of earth and something to hope for.

Miyazaki reworks Tezuka by adapting the sensibilities of his subjects and characters, effectively draining them of Disney-esque inflections, without surrounding a peculiarly Japanese post-nuclear mode of imagining other worlds. If Tezuka is nostalgic, Miyazaki is elegiac. He paints worlds which ideally might exit - the agricultural utopia of Nausicaa; the small town charm of Kiki's Delivery Service; the second lease of life in the country of Totoro - but which may only live on painted cells.