Howl's Moving Castle - Hauru no ugoku shiro (2004)
Das wandelnde Schloss
Interview with Hayao Miyazaki (Director)
Hayao Miyazaki
OutNow.CH met with Hayao Miyazaki at the Venice Filmfestival in 2005. The most successful maker of anime films started his career in 1963 at Studio Toei. His first major hit was Nausicaä based on his own manga series in 1984. With the money he was able to found his own film studio together with his colleague Isao Takahata. He named it "Studio Ghibli" after an Italian plane in WW2, that got its name from a wind blowing in the Sahara dessert.
In spite of major success with his work back home Hayao Miyazaki was known only to fans and insiders of Japanese Animation in the West for a long time. This changed with Mononoke Hime and especially Spirited Away for which he won an Oscar in 2003. His newest film is called Howl's Moving Castle.
The OutNow.CH-interview was conducted with a translator. We struggled to understand what she was saying as you soon might found out reading the English version of the Interview. The German translation we made is slightly better but that doesn't help much if your are an English-speaking reader. OutNow.CH is sorry.
OutNow.CH (ON): How important was it for you to get this Golden Lion in Venice? Why did you come here and not to Berlin to get the Golden Bear for Spirited away or to Los Angeles to get the Oscar?
Hayao Miyazaki (HM): I hate sitting and worrying wheather I get a prize or not. Here I knew for sure that I would get the award and that is why I came. (Pause) Actually Marco Müller was very persisting so I gave up. (laughs)
A sure winner
ON: You are often called "The God of Japanese Animation". Is it still possible to lead a normal life with such a status?
HM: (He rolls his eyes) I live a life of a very common man in his early senior years. I go shopping, also food, and I often go to local coffee shops.
ON: There are a lot of books and documentaries about you. Do you sometimes read parts of them?
HM: First of all, I don't have internet, so I can not. I live a peaceful live. I do not think that I read many. On very rare occasions I have read books about me written by critics. But usually, when I read them, I want to go up and punch them. But I would be too weak anyway.
ON: Why do you want to punch them?
HM: They just do not understand me, they do not get it.
ON: Do you feel any competition with the other creators?
HM: A peaceful heart does not look at the other peoples' work. Because I do not watch film or TV, I can go without anything visual in my life. I am not interested. For me I prefer walking and looking at the scenery around me.
Is it lonely at the top?
ON: How are you related to the younger movie makers in Japan? Do you feel sometimes lonely in this scene?
HM: I never feel the solitude, the lonliness you are talking about. But sometimes I do feel like sucking on their life blood by making films. Regarding influence: There is this one animator I have been telling for twenty years: Come to work. And he still does not come to work. So I think I do not have a lot of influence on the younger artists.
ON: Animation in a true sense of the word, I mean not consisting of digital ones and zeros, is a very ageing art. Do you feel that it is going to disappear with your generation, or are there any new talents?
HM: There are not many of our kind anymore. The new generation is only interested in 3D-Animation. So the old style might disappear, yes.
ON: What do you think is special about the traditional style of animation?
Scene from Spirited Away
HM: In animation you draw with your pencil very many drawings. It is not, that you already know in the beginning, which line you are going to draw. It is like your discovering them on the way. All these little discoveries is why I am really interested in animation. The whole process. While with the other one, it is all decided from the beginning.
Let us say, that there is a scene with a character, which has to walk towards here (he shows it with his lighter). We know he is going to start here and that he needs to end up here. So we already know, where he is going. So I am going to animate something that is already decided.
Or the other way is, you think, maybe he cannot reach this place. And let us say, the man will not be able to go there: What do we do? We have to change the story line. There might be some different routes, different possibilities that will open up. That makes 2D-animation interesting. Or you can make it boring, by just drawing the predecided actions. Of course, I do story boards and I hand them out to all my animators to work on them and then after that, I am checking the animations and I realise that I made a mistake. You discover that it was a mistake to have this person start here and end up there. So maybe you can change this in 3D to, but if you do that, it probably is going to cost much more.
Doing 2D-animation is just like searching and finding the line, that is inside you and let it come up to your pencil. So while you are using a pencil, you should not use your consciousness. So ninety percent of my staff is wrong (laughs). But there are a few painters that use their subconsciousness. But unfortunately we have not find a lot of those yet. Because, as I said earlier, they have seen too much virtual reality and they all surrended. So animation is a very senior age industry now.
ON: Why do you prefer traditional animation to the CGI-Animation?
HM: First I do not feel attracted to that visual style. But we took in a lot of 3D-animation. Actually I think, we brought in to many. We should use a pencil and paper.
ON: What do you think of Pixar Studios and their films?
HM: I think John Lasseter is doing a great job. I would never tell him to do 2D and he never tells me to do 3D. We both stay in our own territories. But I am worried about his health. He is working way too much. Coming to Venice I brought my wife, but usually I am very workaholic. All I did was work, work, work and I did not take care of my home, of my children. I let my wife do all this. But John Lasseter he is busy with work, he is a good father, he even puts a lot of time in his hobby. So he works five times more than I do, and that is why I am worried about his health.
ON: There is a theme of ecological concern in all of your movies. Are you concerned about the state of nature and do you use your stories to give the audience a message?
HM: I do not make films to send out messages about ecology. But because I feel ecology is important, because it is part of my personal values, the problem comes up in my films.
ON: What can you tell us about Europe?
Mononoke Hime
HM: We made Heidi, we made Porco Rosso, we made Howl's Moving Castle. All these were set in Europe. We probably read more European than Japanese literature growing up. We read so much from different countries, Russia, France, Great Britain. So all these Influences get mixed up. Sometimes I even do not remember where they came from. We were influenced by art, music and films from Europe. Because of all these influences we receive I do not want to stick my films just to Japan. There are a lot of other places which I am interested in. I just want to make, what I feel I want to make.
There are some ideas about films about Japan that I would like to make. But because of modernism in Japan everything became very ambigous. And it is really hard to find the really japanese things within these stories. I do not feel like I made a film that really portrayed Japan the way I wanted too. But I would like to make a film about a story my mother told me, about old slum life in Japan. But it is a very difficult project. Because of the modernism, that came to Japan, there is a lot of Japanese literature that portrays only the suffering, that people had to express because of this modernism. But there is also joy, the happiness, the positive side that was brought into Japanese life, and there is almost no literature about it. And this is, why it is so hard to make a film, because there is not enough material, so we have to invent it all by ourselves, there are no ideas yet. The other problem is, we do not have enough talents that come up whith these ideas.
ON: How do you feel about the loss of traditional values in Japan? Do you think it is because of this modernism?
HM: A lot of bad aspects of the modernism have been discussed by lot of people. But we have to think about the future. What I would like to do, is dig in deeper in the old, authentic native values that are embedded in the memory of mankind in Japan. I think they are still there in the memories of children's hearts, even though in todays lifestyles a lot of traditional values might have been lost. And that is why I want to reach out for childrens thoughts, that we will be able to touch upon them.
ON: I have heard that you work also in poetry and architecture. How does that influence your films?
HM: That's just a hobby (laughs). There are other hobbies, I can not even tell you about here.
ON: When you are working on a new project: What comes first, the images or the story?
HM: Of course the images comes first. We make the story work to make that imagery (laughs) But there are some moments when I find out that I wanted to use this image. But then I realise, the story does not work this way and I end up with nothing.
ON: So it is unpredictable?
HM: Yes, you do not know, what comes out until you actually make it.
ON: Are you working on a new movie?
HM: Right now, I am working on three short animation movies, that will only be screened in the Ghibli-Museum in Tokyo. We made those simultaneously and it took us one year to make these shorts. So the producer is really anxious about the money part (laughs). But I think they are going to be good.
ON: What are they about?
HM: I do not know, if this bug exists in Italy. It is about a water spider, which is underneath the water that falls in love. The spider breathes with his derriere. So he has to come to the surface, attaches a airbubble and then he goes down again like with an aqualung. But I do not want to tell to much about it.
ON: Where did you find the inspiration for that one?
HM: It was a small comic strip, that portrayed a spider, that lives in the water. It really stuck in my memory.
