Master of Animation: The Legacy of Hayao Miyazaki

How to summarize Hayao Miyazaki in a few words? Brilliant, magical, ecologist, fantastic, cultural, wise, a true master of his art: animation. The Japanese director is one of the most iconic and undisputed great film directors of our times. Over a career than spanned five decades, Miyazaki has vowed to enchant, mesmerize and enlighten the viewers willing to take the plunge into the master 's lyrical worlds.

From his first major hit Nausicaä in 1984, Miyazaki has been extraordinarily consistent in the quality, the richness and the freshness of his following features, building one of the most accomplished filmography in cinema 's history made of strong testament films to educate the world and its people (Nausicaä, Mononoke, The Wind Rises),

After finding its definite drawing style through the intensive study of the French animated film Le Roi et L 'oiseau (the King and the Mockingbird) by Paul Grimault in the early 80 's, Miyazaki wrote, drew and directed his second full feature film as if it would be his last. The result is an extremely ambitious movie that first introduced Hayao Miyazaki to the world and opened a new era for animation.

Considered as a cult film, Nausicaä is about an eponymous character, a princess, who strives to save the world as she can from its inherent destruction. We are a thousand years after human-created monsters destroyed the earth, which is now trying to reconstruct itself at the cost of the human civilization. A toxic forest and its enormous insects are the threat, echoing the possible results of a nuclear war that could lead to the extinction of the human

It is an epic story dressed in Jules Vernien style, about a secret stone kept by a young princess that holds the mystery of a castle in the sky belonging to a lost civilization - the Atlantis. Miyazaki re-explored some themes already visited in Nausicaä, with the giants created by man that destroyed the world once upon a time, as well as the human race for conquest, survival and domination.

Visually we can see traces of Miyazaki 's evolution towards his landmark microscopic details in the background of a room, a town, a house, a scene. His landscapes and background are so infinite, so precise and typical that they truly give life to its scenery and characters. A few years later the base of Laputa 's scenario would be used and remodeled to give birth to the popular animation TV series Nadia, The Secret of Blue Water, by the studio