Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in January 1941. His family firm made rudders for the Zero fighter, which is a fact he has circled for his entire career without ever quite resolving — a man who loves aircraft more than almost anything and has spent fifty years making films about what aircraft are for.
Toei, television, and twenty years of not directing features
He joined Toei Animation in 1963 as an in-between animator and stayed for eight years, working his way up while also serving in the studio's labour union — where he met Isao Takahata, four years older, who became the more decisive relationship of his professional life. Through the 1970s he worked in television, including Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Future Boy Conan, and on layout and scene design at a volume that is difficult to comprehend now.
His first feature as director was The Castle of Cagliostro in 1979. He was 38. His second, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, came in 1984 and led directly to the founding of Studio Ghibli the following year. In other words, roughly two decades of craft work preceded any of the films he is famous for, which is worth remembering whenever his output is described as effortless.
He does not write a screenplay. He starts drawing and finds out what the film is by making it.
The storyboard method
Miyazaki works from storyboards rather than a completed script, and he has repeatedly begun production without knowing how a film ends. Animation started on Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away while the back half of each was still unresolved. Toshio Suzuki's job, at least partly, was to hold distribution schedules together while this happened.
This is a genuinely unusual way to make an animated feature. It means the film's shape emerges from drawing rather than from planning, and it explains both the extraordinary sequences that clearly could not have been designed on paper first and the occasional third acts that feel like they arrived at speed. It also means he personally corrects an enormous quantity of other people's drawings, which is where the studio's visual consistency comes from and also why his films take four to seven years.
What the films keep coming back to
- Flight, as a physical fact. Not weightless magic — his flying machines have drag, they wobble, they stall, and the people flying them work at it.
- Work. Kiki runs a delivery business. Sophie cleans a castle. Chihiro scrubs a tub. Labour is where his characters recover themselves.
- Refusal of clean villains. Lady Eboshi is destroying a forest and running a settlement that shelters lepers and former brothel workers. The film does not resolve this and does not want to.
- Environmental damage without a lesson. The forests are dying, humans did it, and no character delivers a speech about recycling.
- Children who are competent. They are frightened, but they are never stupid, and adults do not rescue them.
The retirements
He announced retirement after Princess Mononoke in 1997 and made five more features. He announced it formally at a press conference in September 2013 after The Wind Rises, and was back inside two years, first on a short for the museum and then on the feature that became The Boy and the Heron. He suggested he was done again around that film's release.
In March 2026, Toshio Suzuki and Gorō Miyazaki confirmed that he is still developing something new — he turned 84 that January — with the caveat that his energy varies day to day. The same event unveiled a piece called the Panorama Box: a layered physical display arranging backgrounds and figures from the films in depth. Which is, essentially, a multiplane camera you can stand in front of, made by a man who has spent his life trying to give flat drawings somewhere to be.
The retirement announcements read as vanity from a distance and, I suspect, are nothing of the kind. Each one comes after a film that nearly finished him physically. He means it when he says it. Then a few months pass and he starts drawing again, because that is the only thing he has ever done with a day.
The Wind Rises and the argument about it
His 2013 film about Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Zero, was attacked from both directions in Japan — as insufficiently critical of Japan's war and as unpatriotic for its critical remarks about it. The film's actual position is uncomfortable and deliberate: a man builds beautiful machines, the machines are used to kill people, and he builds them anyway because the beauty was real. Miyazaki does not let Jiro off, and he does not pretend the aircraft were not extraordinary. It is the most personal film he has made about being the son of a man who made parts for those aircraft.
- Born
- 5 January 1941, Tokyo
- First feature
- The Castle of Cagliostro, 1979
- Method
- Storyboards drawn in production; no completed screenplay first
- Academy Awards
- Spirited Away (2003); The Boy and the Heron (2024); honorary award 2014
- Status, 2026
- Developing a new project, per the studio in March 2026
Biographical detail here follows the public record and the studio's own statements. Interpretation is mine. Corrections: contact.