When you picture the creator of, you know, the
world's most beloved magical, just completely
comforting animated films, what do you see? You
probably imagine this gentle, grandfatherly figure.
Oh, absolutely. Like someone who just looks at
the world with boundless optimism and this childlike
wonder. Right. But what if I told you the man
behind those cozy magical worlds is actually,
well, a fierce, chain -smoking pessimist? Which
is pretty jarring to hear. It really is. A man
who, honestly, frequently declares that the modern
world is completely doomed, who absolutely despises
the animation industry that he helped build,
and whose films are often born from a place of
profound trauma and guilt. It is the ultimate
paradox, really. I mean, you have an artist whose
work feels like a warm hug, but the man himself
is incredibly demanding, often super cynical,
and forged in the fires of literal warfare. Welcome
to the Deep Dive. Today we're immersing you in
the life and the mind of the legendary Japanese
animator and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. But our
mission today isn't to just, you know, recap
the plots of movies you probably already love.
Well, you can just go watch them for that. Exactly.
We want to get to the absolute core of the man
himself. We're going to break down his massive
contradictions, his agonizing creative process,
and how a really heavy personal history forged
this completely unique worldview. It's basically
your shortcut to understanding the why behind
his genius. Okay, let's unpack this. Where do
we even begin to make sense of a mind like Miyazaki's?
Well, we really have to start in the flames of
World War II. because to understand the fiercely
pacifist, nature -loving world he builds on screen,
you first have to understand the incredibly contradictory,
mechanized world that actually built him. So
he was born in 1941 in Tokyo, and his family's
survival, and indeed their comfort, was directly
tied to the machinery of war. And comfort is
definitely the key word there, which is where
all that guilt comes in later. His father, Katsuji,
was the director of Miyazaki Airplane. Yeah,
and they weren't just some generic factory. They
manufactured the literal rudders for Japanese
fighter planes. Including the infamous A6M Zeroes,
right? Exactly. So while the rest of the country
is plunging into unimaginable poverty and starvation
during the war, the Miyazaki family remains affluent.
They're essentially war profiteers. Wow. And
this created a massive cognitive dissonance for
young Hayao. I mean, it haunted him for decades.
Because he actually loved the planes. Like he
was obsessed with drawing battleships, tanks
and fighter jets as a kid. Yeah, he admitted
he mostly drew them because he felt he wasn't
really good at drawing human beings yet. Yeah.
But he genuinely loved the aesthetic beauty of
these flying machines. But then he simultaneously
experiencing the absolute horror of what those
machines actually do. I mean, when he was just
four years old. The devastating fire bombings
of Utsunomiya and Kanuma forced his family to
flee for their lives. Right in the back of the
truck. Yeah, and he vividly remembered the sky
being on fire and the sheer trauma of leaving
other desperate people behind as they escaped.
Loving the machine, but hating its purpose. It's
this tension he never really fully resolved,
and you see it in almost every film he makes.
But there's a second pillar to his childhood
that is just as crucial, and that is his mother,
Yoshiko. Oh, this part is fascinating. It really
is. Yeah. From 1947 to 1955, which is essentially
his entire formative childhood, she was bedridden
with spinal tuberculosis. Which forces him and
his brothers to take on all these domestic duties
and just grow up incredibly fast. But she wasn't
just this, you know, tragic passive figure, right?
Not at all. What's so interesting here is how
her personality... completely defined the expectations
of her physical condition. Yoshiko was a remarkably
strict, highly intellectual woman. Right. She
wasn't the stereotypical, quiet, subservient
mother figure of that specific era. Exactly.
She possessed this fierce skepticism of socially
accepted norms and authority. And you can draw
a direct straight line from her hospital bed
to his movies. I mean, her strict intellect and
her physical struggles directly inspired the
fiercely independent, strong female protagonist
that basically became his. Oh, 100%. Like, when
you watch a movie like Laputa, Castle in the
Sky, and you see the tough -as -nails sky pirate
Captain Dola, or you see the mother Yasuko in
My Neighbor Totoro watching over her kids from
a hospital bed, you aren't just seeing characters.
You're looking at direct echoes of Yoshiko Miyazaki.
He was essentially giving his mother the ability
to fly and have these grand adventures through
his art, sort of compensating for the years she
spent trapped in a bed. And her relentless questioning
of societal norms definitely became his operating
system. How so? Well, because when he finally
enters the animation industry in the early 1960s,
he doesn't just put his head down and conform.
he becomes a massive problem for management.
I still struggle to wrap my head around this
part of his life. Because when you think of him
today, you picture this quiet, silver -haired
lone genius working in a serene cabin somewhere
in the woods. Right, totally. But in 1963, when
he joins Toei Animation, he's a radical industry
rebel. He's furious. And to be fair, the conditions
were incredibly grim. He's renting this tiny
freezing apartment for, like, 6 ,000 yen a month,
and his starting salary is only 19 ,500 yen.
Barely surviving. And the work itself was totally
soul crushing for someone with his imagination.
He was stuck doing what the industry calls in
-between art. Okay, for those of you listening
who might not know the mechanics of that, what
does in -betweening actually entail? Why did
he hate it so much? So in traditional animation,
the lead animators draw the keyframes. That's
the start and the end of an action. The in -betweeners
are the junior artists who have to draw the dozens
of frames that connect those two poses to make
the movement fluid. Ah, got it. It is highly
technical, incredibly tedious assembly line work.
You aren't creating the acting or the emotion
at all. You are essentially human software just
filling in the gaps. And for a guy who wants
to build entire worlds, that must have felt like
being a cog in a machine. Exactly. So he rebels.
In 1964, he becomes the chief secretary of the
company's labor union. He is actively organizing
strikes and fighting management for workers'
rights. And he's doing this alongside Izo Takahata,
right? The man who would eventually become his
lifelong creative partner. It's honestly like
finding out Walt Disney spent his 20s as a radical
labor leader trying to tear down the studio system.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, this
labor background is the skeleton key to his entire
worldview. It cemented a core lifelong belief
for Miyazaki. He explicitly stated that accompany
a common property of the people that work there.
Think about how radical that is. Right. This
wasn't just some youthful rebellious phase. It
became the bedrock of his storytelling. It's
why you see him constantly critiquing both capitalist
greed and communist exploitation in his films.
He became deeply skeptical of any system, whether
political or corporate, that crushes the individual
worker or treats humans as disposable cogs. He
was so fiercely determined to find his own authentic
voice that he actually went back and destroyed
his own early manga drawings. Yeah, he just ripped
them up. He felt he was just mindlessly copying
the popular style of Osamu Tezuka. the creator
of Astro Boy, which was the dominant style of
the time. He thought it was, quote unquote, bad
form to just chase trends. But what was the catalyst?
What takes him from being an angry, frustrated
union rep to a visionary storyteller? It was
a very specific cinematic experience. He snuck
out to see Japan's first feature length color
animated film. The White Snake Enchantress. Oh,
right. Yeah, he was supposed to be studying for
exams, but the film completely derailed his life.
It moved him to tears. And not just because it
was pretty to look at. It made him realize that
animation didn't have to be this cynical, mass
-produced product. It could be a vehicle to create
a pure, earnest world. And that relentless pursuit
of pure, uncompromised creative control is what
eventually leads him and Takahata to break away
entirely. In 1985, they build their own Empire
Studio Ghibli. And the name itself is so telling.
Yeah. It's named after an Italian aircraft, the
Caproni K -309. The word Ghibli literally means
a hot wind that blows in the desert. Their stated
goal was to blow a hot new wind through the entire
animation industry. They wanted to burn down
the old establishment and build something pure.
But here's the catch. By creating his own studio,
Miyazaki essentially became the management he
used to fight against. Oh, the irony. Yeah. He
established a highly rigid, fiercely traditionalist
philosophy about what animation must be. And
he holds the modern industry in absolute contempt.
And here's where it gets really interesting.
The undisputed god of anime, a man worshipped
by millions of fans globally. kind of despises
hardcore anime culture. He really does. He has
this famous critique where he claims that modern
anime is produced by humans who can't stand looking
at other humans. He argues this is exactly why
the industry is overrun by otaku, which is a
term he uses with heavy disdain to describe this
obsessive insular fanaticism. Yes, he draws a
very hard, very hostile line in the sand against
that culture. But I have to push back on this
a little. Isn't he basically biting the hand
that feeds him? I mean, he makes his millions
off these exact fans. Why is he so fiercely opposed
to a culture that reveres his every pencil stroke?
Because he views that insular fandom as a creative
death trap. For Miyazaki, true art absolutely
must be a reflection of lived physical experience.
He demands that his animators spend their time
observing real people in the real world. So like
how a person actually moves? Exactly. How does
a tired man shift his weight on a train? How
does a child pull their arm away when they're
frustrated? If you only watch anime and then
you sit down to draw anime, you are making a
copy of a copy. You are referencing another artist's
interpretation of a human rather than looking
at a human yourself. If you lose the humanity,
you just end up repeating genre tropes. Exactly.
The art becomes incredibly thin. This is why
his fantastical worlds feel so uniquely heavy
and grounded. When you watch Chihiro running
breathlessly through the bathhouse and spirited
away, or you watch the cumbersome clanking machinery
of Howl's Moving Castle, the physics and the
emotional weight feel completely real. They aren't
built on algorithms or popular trends. They're
built on raw, genuine human observation. Right.
Which perfectly explains a moment that recently
went viral, his absolute visceral hatred for
artificial intelligence and art. There's this
famous incident where a tech team eagerly showed
him an AI -generated zombie animation where the
zombie was moving in these grotesque, physically
impossible ways. Oh, that video is intense. It
is. And he didn't just politely nod and say it
wasn't for him. He completely annihilated them.
He called the AI animation an insult to life
itself. He looked the creator in the eye and
told him he clearly had no idea what pain is
whatsoever. It's a brutal takedown. It's honestly
incredibly uncomfortable to watch. That's a classic
case of an older artist being a Luddite. Like,
when photography was invented, painters panicked
and called it soulless. When digital animation
arrived, hand -drawn purists hated it. Isn't
he just an old man yelling at a new tool? It
goes much deeper than just protecting a medium.
It's a profound philosophical violation for him.
For Miyazaki, the root of all artistic empathy
is the capacity to experience and understand
pain. Wow. Physical pain, emotional pain, exhaustion,
grief. Because a machine cannot feel pain, it
cannot empathize. And if it cannot empathize,
anything it generates is inherently hollow. It's
just a statistical arrangement of pixels mimicking
an emotion it doesn't actually understand. To
him, accepting AI as art means surrendering our
own humanity. That makes total sense when you
frame it like that. He demands that his teams
observe real, complex, suffering humans. And
because of that, the worlds he creates totally
reject the simple black and white morality we
are so used to seeing. You don't get that standard
Hollywood blockbuster setup where the pure, flawless
hero punches the purely evil villain into a laser
beam and saves the universe. Not at all. His
characters are profoundly morally ambiguous.
They are messy, They make mistakes and they hold
contradictory beliefs, just like the man who
draws them. Even his most terrifying antagonists
usually have deep redeeming qualities or completely
understandable motivations. And those motivations
are almost always tied to real world crises.
Environmentalism isn't just a background theme
for him. It's the core conflict. Nausicaä of
the Valley of the Wind was directly inspired
by the tragic Minamata Bay disaster in Japan,
where industrial mercury poisoning devastated
a local community. examining how nature violently
responds to a toxic environment. Yeah, and Princess
Mononoke is heavily rooted in the historical
Morimachi period, which he pinpointed as the
exact era when humanity stopped worshipping nature
as a divine force and started trying to aggressively
dominate and extract from it. And this bleeds
directly into his real -world political stances.
Because he demands authenticity in his art, he
refuses to play the role of the polite, neutral
entertainer in his public life. Right. And just
as a quick reminder to everyone listening, we
are just looking at his documented worldview
here neutrally as facts from the source material.
We aren't endorsing any specific political side.
We're simply reporting on what he said and did.
Right. Exactly. But looking at those statements,
his politics are just as messy and vocal as his
characters. He doesn't fit neatly into any modern
political box, and he refuses to stay quiet.
He openly and harshly criticized Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe's attempts to revise Japan's
pacifist constitution. arguing that a nation
must own its dark history. And at the same time,
he completely boycotted the 2003 Academy Awards.
He refused to travel to the U .S. to accept his
Oscar for Spirited Away in direct protest of
the U .S. invasion of Iraq. He is remarkably
consistent in his antiwar beliefs, regardless
of who is actually fighting. But he also isn't
afraid to criticize movements that others might
champion. That's right. After the tragic terrorist
attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo, while much of the world was around the
publication in the name of free speech, Miyazaki
criticized the magazine. He argued that while
parodying politicians is fair game and necessary,
caricaturing other people's deeply held cultures
and religions is a fundamental mistake. He just
calls it exactly as he sees it, constantly risking
his own popularity. So what does this all mean
for the viewer? When you sit down for a Miyazaki
deep dive, you aren't just rooting for the bad
guy to be defeated. You're rooting for everyone
to step back, look at the damage they're causing,
and reach an understanding. And to really grasp
that dynamic, we have to recognize the deep,
goodest roots of his storytelling. In the Western
narrative tradition, evil is usually an external
entity like... a dark lord, a corrupt king, a
specific person you can destroy to fix the world.
Right, the bad guy you have to defeat. Exactly.
But in Miyazaki's films, evil is an internal
state. It is greed, it is ill will, it is delusion.
The perfect example of that is the no -face spirit
in Spirited Away. It's this terrifying gluttonous
monster, but it isn't inherently evil. It's like
a sponge. It just absorbs the greed, the stress,
and the toxicity of the bathhouse environment
around it. Precisely. And so, survival for a
character like Chihiro isn't about acquiring
a magic sword to vanquish No -Face. It's about
acquiring the internal resilience to survive
a corrupt environment without losing her own
identity. It's about finding the empathy to understand
what the monster actually needs to heal. Which
is incredible. It is a radically different, profoundly
mature narrative structure disguised as a children's
movie. But achieving that level of narrative
maturity, pouring that intense moral philosophy,
and putting that staggering amount of hand -drawn
detail into every single frame, it comes at a
massive, massive cost. An almost unimaginable
physical and emotional toll. You have to remember,
he doesn't just write the script and hand it
off. His process is notoriously obsessive. He
oversees every single frame. Take a movie like
Ponyo. To capture the chaotic, fluid nature of
water without relying on computers, his team
had to draw a record 170 ,000 individual hand
-painted frames. And he is in the trenches for
all of it. Yeah, destroying his eyesight, destroying
the nerves in his hands, which completely explains
why he has publicly announced his retirement
so many times. Yes, it became a bit of a running
joke. He finished Princess Mononoke and said
he was done. He finished Spirited Away and said
he was done. He finished The Wind Rises, gave
a massive press conference, and said his time
as a feature director was definitively over.
He continually pushes himself to the absolute
brink of physical collapse, declares he can't
go on, and then his own mind pulls him back to
the drawing board. This is an addiction. It reminds
me of a master watchmaker who refuses to use
automated tools. He knows the machine could do
it faster, but he believes the tiny, agonizing
imperfections of doing it by hand are the only
proof that a human soul was involved in the creation.
It's a great analogy. But the tragic part of
this obsessive dedication isn't just his physical
health. The real tragedy is the cost to his family.
He spent his entire life painstakingly animating
these perfect, magical, resilient families on
screen. He comforted millions of children around
the world. But to do that, he was largely absent
for his own children. It was a profound, painful
irony. His singular dedication deeply fractured
his relationship with his sons. His eldest son,
Goro, who actually became a director at Studio
Ghibli himself under immense pressure, once gave
a truly heartbreaking assessment of his dad.
What did he say? He said Hayao Miyazaki gets
zero marks as a father, but full marks as a director
of animated films. Wow. Zero marks as a father.
That is gut -wrenching to hear. Goro even admitted
that when he was growing up, the only way he
could try to understand what his dad was thinking
or feeling was by going to the theater and watching
his movies. Because the man himself was simply
never home to talk to. And Miyazaki knew this.
He carried that guilt just as heavily as he carried
the guilt of his family's wartime business. He
knew he owed his son an apology. And how does
a man who only knows how to speak through animation
apologize? He makes another movie. Yes. Even
in his 80s, long after his definitive retirement,
he returned to the studio every single day to
create The Boy and the Heron. It was an agonizing
process that won him a second Oscar at age 83.
This raises an important question. Is this relentless
compulsion to create a gift to the world, or
is it a curse on the artist? For Miyazaki, his
films aren't just entertainment products. They
act as his ultimate, most profound personal expression.
They are his primary way of communicating with
the world at large. And in the case of The Boy
and the Heron, it feels like a very specific,
painstakingly animated apology to his son when
simple conversations failed him. It's the ultimate
sacrifice of the artist. He essentially fed his
own reality, his own health, in his own family
life into the furnace to keep the fantastical
worlds burning brightly for the rest of us. And
that brings us full circle on the magnificent
messy contradictions of Hayao Miyazaki. He is
the lifelong pacifist who never stopped abiring
the sleek deadly design of war planes. He is
the absent father who became a comforting paternal
figure to generations of children. And the undisputed
legend of anime who practically begs his own
animators and his fans to look away from their
screens and actually look at the real world.
Exactly. Which leaves us with one final thing
to ponder especially for all of you listening
right now. Miyazaki deeply believes that relying
on modern technology and referencing other media
makes our culture thin and fake. He insists that
true, enduring art requires the creator to closely,
painfully observe real, breathing life. So what
happens to the artist's storytelling, and more
importantly, what happens to our basic human
empathy, when the next generation grows up observing
life almost entirely through the filter of screens?
If we only ever look at reflections, we eventually
forget what the real thing looks like. Keep that
in mind the next time you marvel at a beautifully
animated meadow and remember the agonizing human
effort it took to draw every single blade of
crass. Thank you for taking this deep dive with
us. We'll catch you on the next one.