Visit to Studio Ghibli to talk to Goro Miyazaki

2023-12-29 23:25:50

You can’t tell from the inconspicuous little building what magical worlds have been created in it. Hidden beneath tall trees, the three-story white concrete building sits in a featureless, gray district of Tokyo, nearly an hour away from glitzy, hip Shibuya. A small, old Japanese man with a gray hedgehog cut and round glasses in sweatpants and adilettes slips through the front door and greets us in a friendly manner. Otherwise the house was pretty deserted that day.

Tim Canning

Correspondent for economics and politics in Japan based in Tokyo.

The fact that this building carries Japanese pop culture around the world like no other is only revealed by a few self-painted posters along the wooden stairs. Wallace and Gromit can be seen on one of them and send “love and respect and great admiration”, on another the main characters of Monster AG stand at a street lamp together with the round furry monster Totoro and convey Pixar’s thanks to Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli Animation Studios for all the inspiration.

Since Hayao Miyazaki founded Studio Ghibli with Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki in the 1980s, he has been a pioneer and leading figure in anime. With films such as “My Neighbor Totoro”, “Kiki’s Little Delivery Service” and “Princess Mononoke”, he ensured that Japanese animation found an enthusiastic audience all over the world. “Spirited Away” followed in 2001, for which he received, among other things, an Oscar – the only one to date for a Japanese anime film.

Nobody can or wants to continue his work

But now Miyazaki, who turns 83 on January 5, really wants to retire. With “The Boy and the Heron” he has once again created a major film with which he could build on his international successes. In Japan it was one of the most important films of the year, although Miyazaki and his producer Suzuki had the fun of releasing it into theaters without any marketing. When it opened in the United States at the beginning of December, it immediately reached number one in the cinema charts. The film is nominated for two Golden Globes. It will be in cinemas in Germany on January 4th.

But the calm that reigns in Studio Ghibli that day is not just a snapshot. With the departure of the grand master, legendary film production is faced with a real problem: no one can or wants to continue his work.

The old man with the gray hedgehog haircut who greeted us at the entrance is Toshio Suzuki, who served as Miyazaki’s producer throughout the decades. “The studio is Miyazaki,” he says in an interview with the FAZ. The question of what the studio should stand for after Miyazaki is his biggest problem at the moment. “The studio, such as it was, was entirely about Hayao Miyazaki’s creative spirit – whether that’s good or bad. To free it from this, we would need a new, talented young person who can develop similar creative power,” says Suzuki.

Scene from the film “The Boy and the Heron”: Image: Studio Ghibli

Miyazaki is known for the fact that he conceived and developed the stories of his films, which were always complex and carried by multi-layered characters, without a script, entirely in the form of so-called storyboards, i.e. drawn scenes. Cinema-length films were then made with the help of more than a hundred illustrators – although computer technology is said to have been largely avoided until recently.

Suzuki says he doesn’t currently see such talent, either at Studio Ghibli or anywhere else in Japan. One reason for this is, of course, that the artists who came to Ghibli always saw Miyazaki as a great genius. “If they wanted to bring their own ideas into the work, they always had to fight hard for it.”