if someone were to ask me what the most important thing is when creating a new animated work, my answer would be that you first have to know what you want to say with it. In other words, you have to have a theme. Surprisingly, perhaps, people sometimes overlook this basic fact of filmmaking and overemphasize technique instead.

Related to that, there was a film called The NeverEnding Story. It was somewhat changed from the original story. A dragon appears and has a very obvious face. You can tell what it is thinking from its face. This was totally uninteresting. For us something is far more likely to become an object of our longing when we don’t know what it is thinking.

In reality, it’s impossible for creators to keep working at the same pace year in and year out. The harder you try to make one good program, the more difficult it is to achieve that same level of quality over and over again. If you really want to create good shows year in and year out, you have to create an organization or system that makes this po

April 18, 1991 Resurrecting the Spirit of Early Cartoon Movies Porco Rosso is designed to be a work that businessmen exhausted from international flights can enjoy even if their minds have been dulled from lack of oxygen. It must also be a work that boys and girls, as well as aunties, can enjoy, but we must never forget that first of all it is a ca

I want to find something that can become our core principles. I haven’t figured out what that is. But I think I might find an entry point for the film in my hazy thoughts about how our country has not yet made a full accounting for the Second World War.

—The music was also particularly good in this film. Miyazaki: I had absolutely no involvement with the music at all. I even joked at one point that maybe we didn’t need any music in the film [laughs], but we couldn’t get away with that. So I left everything regarding music up to Takahata-san, because he knows much more about it. Jo Hisaishi had als

Another thing that’s very important in filmmaking, something we pay strict attention to at Pixar, is pacing. Pacing is the timing of shot after shot after shot after shot. I’m always thinking about the movies being made in Hollywood. They all have a tendency to make things extremely fast-paced. I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s the influence of

Children watching it might forget the story completely and remember only one certain scene, as if it were a beautiful, shiny treasure. Even if they were to see it again as adults and find it didn’t really amount to much, they would still want it to be the way they remembered it. This is probably because it is something that has been personally expe

With so many books and magazines, not only is the worth of each volume devalued, but we also end up not looking at each one carefully—which leads us to miss what we should be taking in. I think it is important to be able to discern what is truly essential.