Hayao Miyazaki, the great animator, to retire

HIyao Miyazaki, the great Japanese animator, announced earlier this month that he intends to retire from making feature-length films.  I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m not too disappointed, because there are so many of his films that I haven’t yet seen.

He is a great storyteller with a great visual imagination.  The trailers I’ve included in this post hint at it, but don’t fully show it.  His stories are exciting and full of derring-do, but they generally end with reconciliation and never with the annihilation of the losing side.

Spirited Away, whose trailer is shown above, is about a little girl who finds herself trapped in a sort of vacation resort for supernatural beings.  It is highly imaginative, and yet, for me, evokes the feelings of a young person on their first job—having to do things that seem impossible, being subject to the whims of powerful, unreasonable beings, and somehow figuring out how to adapt and function well.

Click on Hayao Miyazaki for his Wikipedia biography.

Click on Hayao Miyazaki to retire, his real reasons for leaving anime in the Asahi Shimbum for background on his retirement.

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Below are trailers for some of the Miyazaki movies I’ve seen.  I recommend all of them.

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Tags: Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese anime