Early Life
Miyazaki was born in Bunkyō, Tokyo, during wartime Japan. His father ran Miyazaki Airplane, a company that manufactured rudders for Zero fighter planes — a fact that left a permanent imprint on his imagination. Flight, machinery, and the question of what humans build and why pulse through every film he has ever made.
As a child he was frail and bookish, often bedridden. He consumed manga voraciously and fell in love with drawing. When he saw the 1958 anime film Hakujaden he wept — and knew what he wanted to do with his life.
Career Beginnings
After graduating from Gakushuin University in 1963, Miyazaki joined Toei Animation, Japan's largest animation studio. There he met Isao Takahata, who would become his lifelong collaborator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli. At Toei he worked his way up from in-betweener to key animator, learning every aspect of the craft by doing it.
Through the late 1960s and 1970s he directed episodes and key sequences for celebrated television series, including Lupin III and Future Boy Conan, establishing his signature visual grammar: dynamic motion, expressive backgrounds, strong female protagonists.
Studio Ghibli
In 1985, following the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Miyazaki and Takahata founded Studio Ghibli in the Tokyo suburb of Koganei. The studio's name comes from a Libyan word for the hot desert wind — Miyazaki chose it hoping to blow fresh air through Japanese animation.
At Ghibli, Miyazaki insisted on hand-drawn animation even as the industry shifted to digital. He personally reviewed and corrected thousands of frames per film. He often composed his stories without a completed script, trusting the process of drawing to reveal the story. This method demanded extraordinary commitment from his teams — and produced extraordinary results.
Themes and Vision
Several obsessions recur across all his work. Flight — planes, spirits, witches on broomsticks — appears in nearly every film. So does the tension between industrial civilization and the natural world. So do young women discovering their own strength. Miyazaki distrusts easy heroes and easy villains; his antagonists almost always have comprehensible motivations, often tragic ones.
He has spoken often about his love for Europe — its architecture, its forests, its sense of deep history — and about his grief at what industrial modernity has cost the planet. Princess Mononoke, Nausicaä, and The Wind Rises are all, in different registers, films about that grief.
Legacy
Miyazaki has announced his retirement several times, and returned each time. His most recent film, The Boy and the Heron (2023), was made in his early eighties and feels unmistakably like a valediction — a journey into a world built from memory, grief, and imagination, ending with an act of letting go.
His influence on global animation, storytelling, and visual art is incalculable. Directors from Guillermo del Toro to Pete Docter have credited him as a primary inspiration. He received an Honorary Academy Award in 2015, accepted by his son Goro — Hayao himself did not attend, preferring to remain in Japan and draw.