Starting Point: 1979-1996

That is precisely why it is important to make this film as we enter the chaotic times of the twenty-first century. Princess Mononoke does not purport to solve the problems of the entire world. The battle between rampaging forest gods and humanity cannot end well; there can be no happy ending. Yet, even amid the hatred and slaughter, there are thing

They’ll talk about the “fate of mankind” or something similar; an idea that’s like a Christmas tree but is little more than a trunk, a giant log, standing upright, without any branches or needles.

We are now living in a society that is wealthy yet poverty-stricken. We are able to listen to large amounts of music and watch large numbers of videos. But only a small fraction of these move us.

When using human actors as models, skilled teams of animators required a broad type of acting that mainly showed the human form in silhouette. They came to the conclusion that, rather than the style of acting developed for dramatic films, stage acting was more suitable for animated films. This is precisely the reason that the gestures used by chara

They say that Disney Studios failed to nurture successors. The core animators, called the “Nine Old Men,” stayed at the top too long. They became stale and lost their energy. In reality, Disney did try to cultivate new animators. Disney formed a school and trained animators and unearthed talent, even bringing animators to the U.S. through immigrati

There are too many animators who aren’t interested in that way of expression. Many of them didn’t enter into this field to draw everyday occurrences; they want to forget about reality and go somewhere

Loss of motive. Japanese animation is testimony to the horrors that occur when people keep producing works that don’t assign independent motivations to the protagonists based on some sort of value system.

—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

In Heidi, we had started showing characters walking in different ways, with shortened steps, or with a quick pace, or in a way that seems to go on forever. But in most traditional cartoon movies, the characters reach the horizon in about three steps. For example, I love the cartoon character Farmer Alfalfa who practically comes bounding at us. It’s