Hayao Miyazaki: The Sensei Of Animation

When people think of anime, they think of three possible ways to describe it: a hyper-sexualized mess, an immature tale of monsters, or, if one is watching Sailor Moon, both. No matter the option, many think of anime as something that should stay in Japan. There is an exception though, the works of Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki turns anime into a masterpiece with his own unique style of art that incorporates painstaking details and themes that are near and dear to his heart. Before becoming, as Stan Lee calls him, “The Sensei of Animation”, Lee notes that Miyazaki “trained as an economist but retained his love of animation.” He graduated from Gakushuin University in 1963, but instead of following his degree, he joined Toei Animation based in Tokyo

Like Susan Bye states in “Two Worlds Colliding”, Miyazaki’s film Ponyo has “a distinctive and elaborate hand-drawn animation style (more than 170,000 individual hand-painted frames)” (104). Miyazaki chose to get rid of the computer animation department at Ghibli that year that began with Princess Mononoke, so each frame is hand-painted. Miyazaki was always very involved with animation. He took the time to draw and paint the waves himself, wanting them to be perfect. In every single one of his films, Miyazaki uses watercolor to color his scenes. In Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, Susan J. Napier discussed the art of Princess Mononoke. She said, “In contrast to the pastel palette of many of the director’s films, Princess Mononoke’s forest is designed in deep greens and browns, with the occasional radiant shafts of light penetrating the depths of the forest pools” (243). While Ponyo is very bright with it vibrant hues of green, red, blue, and yellow, Mononoke is very dark. Miyazaki uses color to bring out his feelings associated with the themes of the movies. Ponyo and Spirited Away are very bright, intense colors, used to exemplify the hopeful themes of celebrating the simple things in life and maturing, compared to the dark, muted shades of blues, greens, and browns shown in the scenery of Mononoke’s forest and the greys and blacks of its industrialized, weapon-producing city of

Many of his films include the themes of feminism, the appreciation of nature, pacifism, and Miyazaki’s childhood preoccupation of flight. Miyazaki feministic ways of thinking are displayed in many of his films. Many of them have a female protagonist that, in a way defies, the stereotypical way girls are depicted in Japanese cinema. In Princess Mononoke, Napier notes that it goes against traditional Japanese conventions, saying “Tatara is not governed by a man but by a woman, Lady Eboshi, who has constructed Tatara as a utopian refuge for outcast women and people with incurable illnesses like leprosy” (235). Eboshi leads the village that has more women working than men. The women of Tatara make weapons, essentially a man’s job. Napier adds, “Eboshi is pitted not only against the forest creatures but also another female human, a young girl named San who is the ‘Mononokehime’ or ‘possessed princess’ of the title” (235). San in possessed by the forces of nature and constantly battles against Eboshi due to her hatred of humans and their actions against nature. The appreciation of nature is another of Miyazaki’s recurring themes. In Spirited Away, Miyazaki displays this theme when Chihiro, under the name of “Sen” that the bath house’s matriarch Yubaba gives when she begins work, removes a rusted bicycle and manmade junk from a Stink God only to reveal that it was actually a river spirit. Miyazaki