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Tokyo (dpa) - They are fabulous works full of heroines and forest beings, magical natural forces and ghosts from Japan's mythical Shinto world.
With his full-length cartoons such as "Princess Mononoke", "My Neighbor Totoro" or his Oscar-winning work "Spirited Away", Hayao Miyazaki has enchanted people all over the world and has become an icon of contemporary Japanese anime art.
The genius turns 80 on January 5th.
But it was not for nothing that the old master was once portrayed in his homeland as “Owaranai Hito” - a person who never ends.
Because the director of the legendary Ghibli studio has returned from retirement and is working on another big film.
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Seven years ago after the release of his film “How the Wind Raises”, Miyazaki announced about the developer of the Mitsubishi Zero - Japan's once feared fighter from the Second World War - that he no longer wanted to make full-length feature films.
But Miyazaki had repeatedly announced his resignation in the past.
And then continued.
So this time too: In 2017 he announced a new animated film.
Miyazaki's inspiration for the new work is the children's book “Kimitachi Wa Do Ikiruka” (something like: “How will you live?”) By Yoshino Genzaburo, published in 1937.
Initially, the world-famous animated film studios Ghibli had set the production time to three to four years.
But the extremely complex work on the new plant is taking a long time.
He used to produce ten minutes of animation a month, now it's only one minute a month, Miyazaki said in an interview at the end of 2019.
“We still draw everything by hand.
But it takes more time to finish a film because we draw more frames, ”said producer and Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki last year.
60 animators worked on Miyazaki's new work.
After three years, 36 minutes are produced.
One hopes to finish the film in the next three years.
It is said that many of Miyazaki's former employees at Ghibli are involved in the new project.
Miyazaki founded the world-famous studio in 1985 with Suzuki and the late Isao Takahata, who himself is one of the most famous directors and producers of anime films and who is known in Europe for the television series “Heidi”.
Miyazaki was also involved in the creation of the cult TV series that emerged in the 1970s.
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Miyazaki's films are always about the confrontation between nature and the technological world of humans, about environmental destruction and the question of whether humans and nature can coexist.
As in his masterpiece “Princess Mononoke”, in which the beings of nature put up bitter resistance to people who want to cut down a sacred jungle.
The melodrama, set in the Japanese Middle Ages, is a call to today's industrial society to respect nature.
Miyazaki's heroines always serve the entire spectrum of human personality.
He avoids a simple good-bad scheme.
The peace-loving Miyazaki caused a political controversy in his homeland in 2013 with his film “How the Wind Rises”.
He wanted to honor the “extraordinary genius” of Jiro Horikoshi, the developer of the once feared Zero fighter from the Second World War.
Miyazaki explained that the ultra-right had abused Zero for their “patriotism” and to compensate for their “inferiority complex”.
With his film he wants to tear Horikoshi out of the hands of these people.
The work was published at a time of heightened political tension in Asia, when Japan's right-wing conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought a revision of the pacifist post-war constitution in order to strengthen Japan's military.
In Japan's “shameful history” of World War II, the Zero plane was “one of the few things we Japanese can be proud of,” Miyazaki said in an interview at the time.
Japan's far-right teased the film with hate speech.
Miyazaki was “anti-Japanese” and a “traitor”, they wrote on relevant websites at the time.
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His latest - and possibly last - major work is said to be an “action adventure fantasy” film.
Miyazaki, who is married to an animator and has two sons, creates it especially for his grandson, as his companion Toshio Suzuki let know.
It's his way of saying: "Grandpa is moving to the next world soon, but he's leaving this film behind because he loves you."
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210103-99-882263 / 5
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