Inside the rich visual world of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli

On the desk of Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli is an assortment of coloured pencils and watercolours, an eraser and a stopwatch. It’s the equipment you might expect from this Japanese godfather of animation. Those age-old tools — the stopwatch is for timing the succession of images — underline the craft of Miyazaki’s films, which remain hand-drawn works in an era of pixel-driven design.

His latest film, The Boy and the Heron, is no nostalgia trip solely for fans of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, however. The appeal of its craft has already been borne out at the box office and with awards nominations. The film soared to number one at the North American box office on its release, leaving Beyoncé’s autobiographical Renaissance and Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One in the dust, and it was nominated for a Golden Globe.

But what exactly goes into creating the rich visual world that defines a Miyazaki film?

For The Boy and the Heron, it’s a potent combination of the utterly fantastical and the deeply personal. The plot begins during the second world war as a boy survives the death of his mother in the firebombing of Tokyo, and joins his father and new stepmother in the countryside. But from that point, a talking heron introduces the boy to a parallel world bustling with creatures and mysteries, accessed through a derelict tower.

The rural flight echoes Miyazaki’s own experience as a three-year-old when his family was evacuated first to Utsunomiya and then to Kanuma. That much is the shared history of wartime, but what follows in the film are flights of fancy that double as tests of emotional mettle: Mahito encounters a pirate, a menacing tribe of parakeets, and cute but haunting “warawara” — marshmallow-like representations of souls.

The film’s director of animation, Takeshi Honda, explains via video call that this world is meant to transport the viewer entirely through the looking glass — dreamy and irrational but not necessarily soothing.

“We were aiming for an Alice in Wonderland kind of feeling,” he says. “It gives you a sense of suspense in that you don’t really know what’s going to happen from that point on.”

Honda first joined Miyazaki to work on Ponyo (2008) and The Wind Rises (2013), Miyazaki’s previous “last feature”, about an aerospace engineer. Like many of the 82-year-old Miyazaki’s collaborators, Honda grew up watching the maestro’s work. He remembers seeing Miyazaki’s 1978 television series Future Boy Conan at age 10. “I thought that there could be nothing more wonderful,” he says.

The Boy and the Heron provided the dual chance of working with Miyazaki and, in a way, on Miyazaki’s younger self. Mahito is an elementary schoolboy educated in military-era Japan and “modelled after Miyazaki-san”, Honda says.

The portrayal of Mahito and other characters involves a meeting of minds (and hands). The process blends sensibilities, rather than slavishly carrying out a Miyazaki template. Miyazaki’s initial idea of a character is followed by sketches that might nudge or yank the design in different directions. 

“I would do rough drafts of the character, and then Miyazaki-san would draw over it or do little corrections, and little by little, we tried to bring our ideas together,” Honda says.

For example, one evolving character was the titular heron (voiced by Robert Pattinson in the film’s English-language version). The word involves a pun, Honda explains, which relates directly to the character: in Japanese, sagi means both heron and trickster or scam artist. The bird is drawn as such: crafty, with a croaking voice and a troll-like double identity, his intentions for Mahito hard to discern. But there was also a dash of mischief involved in the design.

“I had the idea of making the character look a bit more scary, but as I continued sketching it, it became a Toshio Suzuki-style character,” Honda says, referring to the film’s producer and Miyazaki’s longtime partner in crime. “That is presumably how Miyazaki-san sees Suzuki-san.”

This playful back-story also bears out the sense of personality that animates Miyazaki’s characters. The parakeets in the film march through the tower with a bustling sense of mission (however obscure to the outside observer). The androgynous pirate whom Mahito encounters likewise seems to have a life (however improbable) that continues when off screen.

In the case of Mahito — an understandably dour, even irritable presence in his grief — one might discern childhood feelings Miyazaki himself may have felt amid the ravages of the war. That’s the opinion of Studio Ghibli vice-president Junichi Nishioka, who has observed Miyazaki over the past two decades.

“It’s a very autobiographical work,” Nishioka confirms. “He’s quite honest — he bears quite a lot.” The film’s Japanese title, How Do You Live?, comes from a 1937 novel but well suits Mahito’s unusual struggle to self-realisation. 

Nishioka first met Miyazaki some 25 years ago. “He was very demanding of the crew, and quite emotional,” Nishioka says, hastening (as the company’s spokesperson) to add: “But nowadays he’s very calm. You don’t see him getting angry that often.”

Miyazaki has been known to apply exacting standards in his collaborations with crew. In The Boy and the Heron, the results are once again visible on screen in the sweeping detail of movement, the vibrant palette and the clear contours even in crowded scenes.

According to Honda, Miyazaki’s signature style doesn’t make animators’ work easy — and that’s a good thing. He favours shots that are at once expansive and detailed, such as the waves of the ocean or the flurry of multiple birds in flight. The perspective chosen for his images, Honda says, opens them up, rather than constraining their scope.

“With other directors’ films, you would see high-angle or low-angle shots, or more close-ups. That allows the director to abbreviate certain details,” Honda says. “But Miyazaki-san doesn’t do that. He doesn’t avoid the work in that way.” 

The success of Miyazaki’s brand of commitment might make it easier for other more handmade efforts to find appreciative audiences. The Peasants, for example, is a recently released animated feature composed through a time-intensive oil-painting technique. The directors, DK and Hugh Welchman, initially attempted to render the film through the use of AI, before returning to handmade techniques that they had previously employed on their feature Loving Vincent, a 2017 story of Van Gogh.

As for The Boy and the Heron, it’s a worthy addition to a body of work that keeps acquiring fans every year, through touring Studio Ghibli programmes, streaming and, most recently, the blockbuster London stage production of My Neighbour Totoro. Miyazaki tells stories that don’t rely on making sense of his curious worlds, or putting protagonists through straightforward A-to-B-to-C quests. He reminds us that sometimes, it’s more fun just to get lost and see where we end up.

In US cinemas now and in UK cinemas from December 26