The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki (2024)

A Very interesting and educational read. I have always enjoyed Miyazaki's films (even before I knew what anime was), so getting a new perspective on the man behind it all made for a fascinating read.

While I knew a lot about the films and their meaning I was able to gain further insight into the why behind everything. Each of his films holds more depth than I thought! So many extra tidbits of knowledge, such as aspects of my Neighbor Totoro was based on his childhood or how Nausicaa was one of his earliest films (I thought it was late 90's or early 2000's!). This covers his work starting with Lupin III, to Studio Ghibli and his Disney contracts and more.

After reading this I have an even greater admiration for Hayao Miyazaki. Not only is his work amazing but his thoughts, drives and purrpose bring everything he does to a higher level! I am very grateful to the author for pulling all this together. This book is filled with interview bits, quotes, ideals and more! About the films, directors, co-workers, etc.

My only qualm with this is there are NO pictures! Not one except the cover. I mean, how can this be the ART of Hayao Miyazaki and not show anything. While I loved all the facts a few (not a lot) pictures stills to illustrate points would have been appreciated. Describing how he shows character emotion is not the same as seeing it and while a picture is nothing compared to the films it is still worth the image to show some basics.

First of all, it is not "animé," it is "anime." Yeah, no weird accent. Because the stressed syllable, like in most Japanese words, is the second syllable counting from the end.

Going on with the proper review, Mrs Cavallaro (and notice how I said Mrs, and not Dr, as it would be for someone with studies on the subject). Anyway, Mrs Cavallaro is well-known for being extremely prolific... And also extremely anonymous. Not a surprise, since appearing in public after writing something like this is clearly asking for a lot of critical response and probably a beating or two from people who actually know the subject.

Many scholars have criticised her work, allegating imitation, poor criticism, and a complete lack of knowledge on her subject.

After all of this, I don't even know why did I expect anything better.

- Otaku are not "animé fans".
- Miyazaki doesn't only direct fantasy.
- Anime not only comes from manga, and Akira certainly isn't a good example.
- If your argument is that Miyazaki is good because it is not anime, you are wrong.
- Wrong definition of the word shoujo, and obviously of the genre too .
- Trying to make Miyazaki ABOVE popular culture is WRONG.
- If you must translate Japanese words, please do it correctly. Please.
- Info-dumping stuff that is not relevant is not okay.
- Info-dumping stuff into a Wikipedia-style is not okay either.
- Citing Wikipedia is DEFINITELY WORSE THAN NOT OKAY.
- Also, indirect quotes and information providers should always be cited, not only direct quotes.
- And when it comes to quotes, they should always introduced and discussed properly to show your understanding of them and their relevance, they never should be any more than five lines TOPS, they definitely shouldn't be the last thing on a chapter (and actually, the last thing on the actual book), and they should always be rewritten (but still credited!) unless there is definitely not a way to summarise or better explain their content.

So yeah. It was painful. It doesn't give any new information, and most of her "sources" are online articles/blogs, websites, and Wikipedia. I still wonder why did I go through the pain of reading this complete, and not stop half-way through. Maybe I was too stubborn to give a 1-star review and kept trying... Unsuccessfully.

This is the second time I've ordered this art book by title, only to discover that there is no ART anywhere in the book other than on the cover and in the title.

What idiot publishes an "art" book without a single illustration. A complete ripoff.

So it doesn't have pictures. Big deal. I'm writing a college essay on Miyazaki; this book is a lifesaver. It is far more academic and serious than the other books I have seen, which, to be honest, are a bit fanboy-ish.

Boo! Too academic! No fun!

I'm surprised by the level of depth this book goes into in terms of cinematographic techniques and the production process. It's an enjoyable and insightful read.

The anime art of Hayao Miyazaki
By Dani Cavallaro

Chapters:
Preface
Introduction
1. The Frame of Reference
2. The Early Years
3. The Ghibli Era: A Brief History of Studio Ghibli
4. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
5. Laputa: Castle in the Sky
6. My Neighbor Totoro
7. Grave of the Fireflies
8. Kiki's Delivery Service
9. Studio Ghibli, 1990-1991
10. Porco Rosso
11. Studio Ghibli, 1992-1994
12. On Your Mark
13. Whisper of the Heart
14. Princess Mononoke
15. Studio Ghibli, 1999-2001
16. Spirited Away
17. Studio Ghibli, 2002-2003
18. Howl's Moving Castle
Postscript: French Connections-The Miyazaki/Moebius Exhibition
Epilogue
Filmography
Appendix 1: Ancillary Products and Media Synergy
Appendix 2: Fans and Their Worlds

Excerpts from the book:
A firm believer in the wisdom of children, Miyazaki has consistently tackled grave issues without ever sanitizing or sentimentalizing their import, let alone dishing out definitive resolutions. These issues range from environmental depletion, the horrors of war, the iniquities of totalitarian regimes and people's enslavement to commodity fetishism, to the setbacks entailed by personal development, the loss of innocence and the cultivation of the values of loyalty, gratitude, courage, self-sacrifice and love.

The social, psychological, political and economic preoccupations addressed by Miyazaki's films hold cross-cultural and even universal relevance. Most prominent among them are the fate of the ecosystem, the ever-present phantom of war, the evils of totalitarianism and the vicissitudes of self-development.

One of the most distinctively Japanese aspects of Miyazaki's films arguably lies with the emphasis they place on the importance of developing, from a relatively early age, a keen sense of personal responsibility, as well as independence and autonomy, in a world that consistently appears to swamp the notions of individual identity and privacy. The process of socialization of the young is thus consistently depicted as a rite of passage embracing both the joys and the tribulations of psychological and emotional growth. However, the ethical imperatives promoted by the films are not situated in a strictly Japanese framework of codes, conventions, rituals and mores. Hence, they are capable of appealing to non-Japanese viewers and to their own sensitivity to the Bildungsroman topos as a thematic and structural motif that has consistently played a major part in the art and literature of numerous cultures.

Profoundly influenced by Marxist theories in his youth, as attested to by his activities as chairman of the Animators Union at Toei Animation Studios, Miyazaki has gradually developed an acute aversion to the notion of slavishly adhering to any one doctrine and sought instead to pursue broadly pacifist and egalitarian principles. To this effect, he stated that in the 1990s, he "totally forsook Marxism" as a result of having "stopped seeing things by class. It's a lie that one is right just because he/she is a laborer. The general public do many stupid things. I can't trust politics" (Miyazaki 1994).

The term "Ghibli" refers to both a hot Sahara wind and the model of the Italian scouting aeroplane used during World War II. It is perhaps unsurprising, given Miyazaki's love of planes and Italy alike, that he should have picked this particular rubric for his studio. (Normally, the studio's name is pronounced as jiburi in Japan and as geeblee in the West.)

Studio Ghibli is quite unique in its intention, at least in principle, to produce only feature films based on original work. This policy involves considerable financial risks since box-office success can never be automatically guaranteed. It is for this reason that animation studios normally work primarily on TV animation series, only occasionally producing a feature based on an already popular series.

Nausicad, released in 1984, drew around 915,000 people to cinemas, and Laputa, released in 1986, attracted around 775,000. The next two films made by Ghibli - to be released in 1988 - were My Neighbor Totoro (dir. Miyazaki) and Grave of the Fireflies (dir. Takahata).

The box office performance of neither Totoro nor Fireflies was especially impressive due to the poor timing of their release outside the popular summer season. Yet the films were highly praised in numerous fields for their outstanding cinematographical quality. Totoro won most of the Japanese picture awards in 1988, including Best Photography. However, the greatest financial benefit ushered in by Totoro consisted of its unforeseen potential in the field of ancillary merchandise: "the stuffed toys were marketed nearly two years after the release of the film, and they were not intentionally created to promote box office performance. What actually happened was that a stuffed toy manufacturer ardently felt that Totoro was a character that deserved to be made into a stuffed toy and eagerly asked Ghibli for its permission. All in all, thanks to the sale of Totoro goods, it now became possible for Ghibli to continually cover for any deficit in production cost." Although this experience alerted the studio to the immense possibilities inherent in the production and marketing of spin-offs (a topic here addressed in Appendix 1), Suzuki, Miyazaki, Takahata and their colleagues remained fervently committed to the policy that film productions to the policy that film productions should come first and that merchandising is merely a result - and not an inevitable one for that matter ("History of Ghibli" 2). The first Ghibli film to achieve Disney-like megasuccess was Kiki's Delivery Service, released in 1989. Approximately 2.64 million people saw the film, making it the indisputable number-one hit among all Japanese movies (i.e. not just animations) released in that year.

The Ghibli Museum provides no formal routes and actively encourages its visitors to relish its space from the heart. Its slogan, appropriately, is Let's Lose Our Way, Together-a motto which could feasibly apply to Miyazaki's entire opus. (Information regarding the Ghibli Museum and image galleries is available at: www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/museum/; www.ghibli-museum.jp/(in Japanese); www.tatutoz.com/ghiblimuseum/)

Chronology of the films created by Studio Ghibli through 2004, as well as an in-depth analysis of major films directed by Hayao MIyazaki from Nausicaa through Howl's Moving Castle.

Cavallaro's analysis ranges from the literary and folkloric to Japanese cultural elements to animation technques. In places the language falls into "academese" but for the most part it's readable as well as informative. I've hunted down several articles, webpages and books on Miyazaki's exquisitely beautiful films, but learned some elements of Japanese culture plus an even greater appreciation for the richness of Miyazaki's storytelling, with layers of artistic, psychological and moral themes.

This book includes a quote from Miyazaki that I found particularly moving, and true for all his movies, not just Spirited Away: "It's all about the truth...the worst movies are those that lie to you while pretending to show you real life. Kids know that is a lie. I'm dealing with real issues."

An excellent book for Miyazaki fans, and a resource for anyone writing papers on his work or trying to convince the skeptical of the lasting value of these "cartoon stories."

This might just be the most detailed book on the Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki. It could pass as an autobiography but it’s not quite one as it really delves into his works, inspirations, motives and how he has revolutionized animation and the movie industry. The book gave me a better understanding of Miyazaki and how much impact he has had in the movie world.

I wanted to write a separate blog post, more in-depth review of this one - but just kinda low on spoons for it.

A lot of people online seemed to think that this would be an actual art book, but it's actually a cinematic/artistic analysis of Miyazaki's works, spanning from the beginning of his career to Howl's Moving Castle. [The most recent work of his that had come out at the time of the writing of the book]

The author is pretty good at hitting/describing certain themes used throughout Miyazaki's works, as well as making them generally understandable for those that don't have a lot of knowledge in art/design and cinema, but one pretty big annoyance I had was that the author seemed to have the need to sit there with a thesaurus and swap out words for other needlessly complicated words that I haven't read/thought about since taking college English. It just seemed really unnecessary.

For those interested in these kind of analysis-like books, this would be pretty interesting. I had to read a lot of these sorts of texts in art history so as much as I love the source material and thought it may have been a quick read, there was a lot of times that my eyes would glaze over and have to go back and read certain sections. You'll definitely have to keep in mind that this is now what would be considered an older book, so a lot of the information is a bit dated [including the use of animé when there doesn't need to be an accent mark, or 'Japanimation'] and when I started to question a lot of the inserted opinions and translations that I knew as layman in the language were incorrect, I looked online and realized there was some controversy with the author and seems to have a long history of things like this.

At the very least, most of the quotes and interviews the book includes are sourced, though some of the self-translations may be questionable. If you're a Studio Ghibli superfan, or someone who likes reading analysis-like texts, this may be for you. I learned a few new things from the book about specific details of some of Miyazaki's movies, but otherwise I felt pretty meh about it.

It was hard to give this book only three stars, because, on one hand, it was a very enriching reading. Dani Cavallaro's analysis of Miyazaki's career and movies was extensive and academic in the best sense of the term. Every chapter devoted to describe the peculiarities of "Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind" or "Princess Mononoke" didn't address only the plot part. There were descriptions of technical aspects about the animation tecniques, the team work behind the movie, the promotion and distribution aspect, the cultural aspects behind Miyazaki's artistic choices.
There were insight about the story of the Studio Ghibli, the works of Takahata and other directors of the Studio, important digressions about the relationship with the Western movie market (especially the US one) and the Disney and Pixar corps.

So, why three stars?

The style.

It was unnecessary pompous at its best, too many adjectives, too much purple prose that made the reading quite difficult and annoying, from time to time. I would've liked a more flowing style, this work is full of interesting concepts and analysis but it forces the reader to re-read more than one time a lot of sentences (too long and too full of subordinate clauses), before fully understand their meaning.

It's a pity, seriously.

If I took a class in college on animation art or the internationalization of Japanese cinema, I'd want this for my textbook. After reading McKee's Story and arriving at this, I learn to appreciate the pacing of scene and character development and revelation in Ghibli's movies.

For a more sobering take on the creative process of Miyazaki, I'd recommend watching the NHK documentary series:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/on...

1,5.

Muy decepcionante. Primero, ¿Quién escribe un libro sobre análisis de películas -tales como las de studio ghibli, sin referencias visuales? No hay ni una imagen.

Además, este libro informativo pareció como cuando en secundaria agarrabas información de todos lados, copiabas, pegabas y tenias un trabajo larguísimo, sí: pero desorganizado, con cosas a corregir y sin haber profundizado en lo importante.

This was very informative, thought-out, and highly descriptive. It made me appreciate the visuals of Ghibli's visuals more and what they mean to their stories, and it gave an in-depth look at Miyazaki's career outside of directing his movies. It was cool, and definitely a recommend for fans of these movies.

woow, got this book as a present and it is the most uncreative deceiving book I have ever seen. In short words she just puts all the art work in Ghibli movies in words no pictures, just describing the art works. Seems like she just puts the Ghibli art in Ai and telling it to write a book about it. It’s so flat

Such detailed analysis of the progression of Ghibli films, relating it to other films in the franchise and other films made at the same time. It is a little biased against some Western films, but it has great information about the progression of animation and what tricks the films have learned over the years.

As someone who is not by any means an expert on film, nor animation, I found this book intriguing and wonderful in its detail of a) Miyazaki and Studi Ghibi's history/culture, b) overarching film themes and c) art styles and technical animation details. Very digestible for the average reader.

Very detailed vocabulary about the work of the man considered by some to be the Walt Disney of Japanese animation/anime. Since I was completely unfamiliar with his work it would have been nice to have had some picture for visual reference. I Googled a lot.

3.5. I really liked the commentary on the films I have seen, I've some catching up to do.

It's NOT an art book! More like an long eassy of some art graduates.

These cast books are exceptionally excellent.

“The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.”
― Hayao Miyazaki

Pocas cosas se ven tan lindas como las películas del estudio Ghibli; me encantó ver el arte de películas tan maravillosas como El Castillo Ambulante, y La Princesa Mononoke.

These book are definitely awesome.

While it's great Cavallaro addresses the formal properties of these films as animations, she fails to synthesise this with her discussion of their themes, which is fairly general in the first place. As such, each case-study can be divided into two sections that fluctuate in length across the book: the first involves summarising a given film's plot and its subtext, the second pointing out visual details as they relate to the production process. Although there are a few factoids to be had with regard to those latter sections, there's little on offer from an aesthetic and thematic perspective for those already intimate with Miyazaki's corpus. To make matters worse, at times one can detect a fan-girl gushing beneath the academic parlance. This and the occasional typo leaves one with the impression that an editor didn't really work with the author in any extensive capacity. Ultimately, the book succeeds as a sophisticated introduction but it's not as in-depth as I'd hoped, and if it does “move beyond the propaedeutic stage” as intended, it only barely inches away from it. That being said, based on what I've sampled, it's probably the best book-length publication on Miyazaki in English to date. It seems the author is publishing another one this year to cover Studio Ghibli's productions post-Howl’s Moving Castle, which will hopefully be less glancing since this period includes fewer films, especially where Miyazaki himself serves as director. It's a shame though since these films (barring The Wind Rises and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, which I have yet to see) frankly aren't as good as nearly all of those preceding them.

Last term, I followed a Japanese cinema class. The first part was about animation, which gave me the opportunity to do an analysis on one of my favorite director, Hayao Miyazaki. His movies, the one from Studio Ghibli, are probably the most well known in North America, from Japan. This studio offered us movies such as, Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso and Spirited Away... more

À la session dernière, j’ai suivi un cours sur le cinéma japonais. La première partie portait sur le cinéma d’animation, ce qui m’a donné la chance de faire une analyse sur l’un de mes réalisateurs préférés, Hayao Miyazaki. Ses films, ceux du Studio Ghibli, sont probablement parmi les plus connus en Amérique du Nord en provenance du Japon. C’est ce studio qui nous a offert des titres tels que, Princesse Mononoke, Porco Rosso et Le Voyage de Chihiro... plust

This was such an interesting take on the development and production of some the loved artwork/anime of Hayao Miyazaki, or just of Studio Ghibli in general. It was really great reading through because it created an even more appreciation of how wonderful these stories and films are. It was also really beneficial if I had recently watched the movies prior, or quickly after to better understand how the artwork was portrayed in a certain manner to convey different ideas. I believe that could be one improvement for this book: to include more visuals to go along with the writing.

I really loved this book. Yes, an academic book with high vocabulary was my pleasure reading, but in all honesty, this was absolutely fascinating! I loved learning more about animation techniques and the commentaries of the different Ghibli movies. I can't say how much I enjoyed this.

I have fond memories of reading this in the cafeteria too :)

a look behind the intention and technical evolution of studio ghilbi. the totoro chapter was very informative and revealed lots of the little bits that coalesced to make it the big epic it is today.