Nowadays we can watch more than enough animation anytime we want. But no matter how good the animation is, when we have too much, it is no longer of good quality. When you listen to music on a Walkman from early in the morning to late at night, your ears start to hurt. It’s exactly the same with an overdose of animation. It’s an oft-repeated aphori

The manga format is so readily comprehended that it has become Japanese culture’s common denominator. That is the peril faced by Japanese culture.

—You have always said that what you want to make is “films” and not “anime.” But what is popular abroad seems to be anime. What do you see as the problem with anime? MIYAZAKI: The major source for Japanese animation is manga, whose greatest characteristic is its method of expression centered on emotions. In order to express emotions, space and time

Some people also suffer from the misconception that Isao Takahata-san and I are both some sort of environmentalists, and that we will make a film out of anything as long as it has an ecological theme or message. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such a film would be like a big fat dried-up log, propped upright. What we need is a living thing

What’s funny about this is that at the time some theorists tried to rationalize what was going on. Some even claimed that we were in a new age, one of “limited animation,” where too much emphasis on making drawings move only hindered story development. They started saying that use of the tome-e, still images employed for effect, was a “new form of