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With such edifices of imagination like Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, and Castle in the Sky under his belt, Hayao Miyazaki must seem like some modern-day Willy Wonka. And you know what? He basically is.
The Old Man Absolutely Loves Planes
In fact, the very word ‘Ghibli’ is taken from the Italian warplane Caproni Ca.309 used in WWII. See, Miyazaki had an enduring love of all machines that can soar; his father owned the company Miyazaki Airplane, which produced tailfins for Japan’s own WWII fighter planes, and which is presumably where the animator’s fascination with mechanized flight began. His obsession clearly carried over into his work; Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind is about, among other themes, the final prototype of a mythical line of flying machines; Castle in the Sky is a similar story of a previous age in which flight and stratospheric civilizations were common; Porco Rosso is the adventure of an ace WWI pilot turned bounty hunter (and is also cursed with a pig’s face); and his final work The Wind Rises is the animated biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, a renowned fighter-plane designer during WWII.
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He Isn’t Pro- or Anti- War, He’s Pro-Passion
Miyazaki’s final film The Wind Rises drew criticisms from all across the political board in Japan for what they call a glorification of a man who created machines of death. In an interview with Animation World Network, he deftly sidestepped all such discussion to say, simply, that he loved passion in a human being: “I am against the use of nuclear power. But when I saw the press conference with the engineers working on the [Fukushima] power plants, answering questions, I saw the same type of purity of their soul that I portrayed in Jiro Horikoshi in the film. The problems of our civilization are so difficult that we can’t only put an “X” in a circle and say “Yes” or “No.”
Also, there is a scene from The Wind Rises in which the protagonist Jiro dreams of Giovanni Bautista Caproni, an Italian warplane designer, who tells him “Aeroplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.”
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He Hand-Draws Because He Must
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From the same interview: "I can only create animation in 2D. There is no other choice for me. I don’t even know how to use a Smartphone."
He's Predicted An End to Worldwide Peacetime . . .
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In an interview with The Telegraph he was asked if The Wind Rises were a reflection of his own personal life and ambitions, to which he replied: “I’ve been very blessed to make animation for 50 years in peaceful times, while they lived in very volatile, violent times. But I think the peaceful time that we are living in is coming to an end.”
. . . And He’s Basically Okay With That
There’s an image set making its rounds on Tumblr these days—it’s taken from the documentary Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, and in the scene, Miyazaki is asked for his feelings regarding the end of Studio Ghibli and his own retirement. His response is pure magic, and has this 'things come and go' attitude, this sense of perspective that can only come from a lofty mind, afloat far above the mundane.
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