He wears an off-white apron whose narrow strap hooks around the neck and attaches with a single button on the left side — the same style of apron he has worn for years as a work and public uniform, a reminder that he is at once artist and artisan, ever on guard against daubs of paint — over a crisp white collared shirt, his white mustache and beard neat and trim, and his white hair blurring into a near halo as he gazes calmly at me through owlish black glasses, across the 6,700 miles from Tokyo to New York.
I have one hour to ask questions.
From “My Neighbor Totoro” He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself.
Miyazaki lives with his wife, Akemi, a former fellow animator — they met as colleagues at Toei Animation nearly 60 years ago on the movie “Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon,” and married in 1965; she stopped working to raise their two sons, at his request, and, he has said in the past, “hasn’t forgiven” him — in Tokorozawa, northwest of Tokyo, where the Totoro Fund .
He built it in 1998, after announcing that he would make no more feature films, then returned to Studio Ghibli the next year with the story idea that would become “Spirited Away,” the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history until last fall’s “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” .
Yet here he is now, making a new film.
And how easily Miyazaki slips from one register to the next, from hushed to clamorous, often in the same scene, as in the exquisitely timed comedy of towering Totoro, with his giant claws, standing beside two little girls at a bus stop in the dark.
Toward the end of his 2004 film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which is mostly devoted to magic — a girl is transformed by a witch into an elderly woman, a wizard shape-shifts into a dark man-bird, a castle uproots itself and clanks around on clawed feet — a great-bellied airship looms into view and starts dropping bombs on a cobblestone town.
He was born in 1941, the same year that Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, and he was 4 years old when American planes attacked the city of Utsunomiya, where his family had been evacuated from Tokyo.
The late antiwar painter Tatsuo Ikeda, who was born in 1928 and conscripted as a teenager to become a kamikaze pilot — the country’s defeat saved him — started out making portraits for American soldiers from snapshots of their girlfriends or wives, and went on to create eerie black-and-white tableaus that bristle with malformed animals and punishing machines.
And perhaps the most harrowing Japanese war film ever made is Studio Ghibli’s 1988 “Grave of the Fireflies,” adapted by Takahata from a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosaka about two children left homeless in the wake of an air raid.
The monster Godzilla first appeared in a live-action 1954 film as a dinosaur, roused from the bottom of the ocean by an American hydrogen bomb test, who spews radiation over Tokyo in a visceral re-enactment of an air raid.
Miyazaki’s movies, with their warplanes and intrusions of Western décor and dress, keep circling back to the traumatic moment when Japan, which until the mid-19th century had kept itself closed off to the outside world, was forced to embrace the West and Western values.
But part of his films’ greatness is that they can also be loved by viewers who never sense the dark current below.
After Japan’s surrender, when there were no more planes to furnish, his father used leftover duralumin, an aluminum alloy that had helped keep the Zero lightweight and dangerous, to make flimsy spoons, which he pawned off on impoverished customers desperate for household goods.
Although Miyazaki never set foot in his father’s factory, which was off limits as a military site, he was entranced by airplanes and the liberation of flight from an early age.
As Miyazaki grew older, he found fault with his father both for profiting off the war and for never expressing any shame or guilt.
Within the world of anime, these characters are called shojo, girls of an in-between age, no longer quite children and not yet women; but where shojo were typically passive figures subject to romance narratives, Miyazaki’s girls display formidable know-how and independence.
Prince Ashitaka in “Princess Mononoke,” whose body has been progressively consumed by the dark stain of a curse, is never completely cured; a shadow remains on his arm, and he is separated from the girl he loves by a sense of duty — he to the humans of Iron Town, she to the wolves of the forest — although they promise to visit each other.
One common mistake — the belief that to draw a cartoon is to draw someone sillier than oneself — must be avoided at all costs.” At the heart of the film is a hard-bitten bounty hunter who takes on the guise of a pig out of a sense of guilt at having survived World War I while his fellow pilots died.
“In the town that I live in, I have precious friends, but I also have people I detest,” Miyazaki tells me.
In many ways he fits the part: the benevolent neighborhood uncle who brings joy to children through his work, picks up trash from the river on his days off and, over the past two and a half decades, has made quiet pilgrimages to a sanitarium near his home for patients with leprosy who, for much of the 20th century, faced segregation by law in such facilities.
To Takahata, Miyazaki’s contradictions made sense: Miyazaki is both an auteur, able to control and perfect every detail in his films, and an idealist endlessly disillusioned by the real world that eludes his grasp, and thus he rants, “yells destructively nihilistic things and blurts out statements that make him sound as though he aspires to become a dictator.” Miyazaki himself has always acknowledged his capacity for anger.
Takahata recounts how in his early days at Toei Animation, Miyazaki would sometimes scare colleagues “by suddenly screaming, ‘Let this damned studio burn down!’” This wasn’t an entirely metaphorical statement, Takahata points out, given Tokyo’s history of earthquakes and fire, and Japan’s precarious position at a place where four tectonic plates creep and shift.
There were calls to revise Japan’s postwar Constitution, which states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” and to allow the country to once again establish offensive military forces.
His mother was ill, too, suffering for years from spinal tuberculosis, and spent long stretches hospitalized like the mother in “My Neighbor Totoro” and the young wife in “The Wind Rises.” But the money his father had stockpiled from government wartime contracts helped keep the family in comfort, and in 1959 Miyazaki wound up at the prestigious Gakushuin University in Tokyo, which was originally established in the 19th century as a school for the nobility and whose students have included Emperor Naruhito and the singer and artist Yoko Ono.
He had started drawing manga in high school and, after graduating from university, took a job at Toei, where he quickly became the secretary general of the animators’ union, negotiating for better working conditions.
Miyazaki does not like to frame his work in explicitly ideological or moral terms. The mission of his films, he says, is to “comfort you — to fill in the gap that might be in your heart or your everyday life.” But his movies are haunted by his grief over the damage humans have done to the natural world.
Near the end, the film presents a fantasy of a world reclaimed by nature, as water fills a dry riverbed and spreads out into a vast sea — as if a visual riposte to the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico’s desolate urban piazzas — untroubled save for a train that skims across its surface.
“I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.” At the same time, Miyazaki resists romanticizing nature as purely benign, again rejecting a binary of good and evil.
A trace of the fairy tale appears in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” in the desperate scene when the heroine follows bloody bird footprints down a dark hallway to find the wounded wizard in a feathered heap, unable to change back to his fully human self, trying not to die in his glittering lair embedded with the toys of the boy still buried inside him.
As Suzuki recalls, the filmmaker, in the throes of preproduction for his first feature, wanted nothing to do with him and accused him of “ripping off children” by making them buy his magazine.
Thus was born a friendship that would turn into an intimate creative collaboration: For his next film, “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” Miyazaki consulted with Suzuki on matters from the intricacy of the drawing style to the final scene, which Suzuki persuaded him to change , his true role is as Miyazaki’s confidante and consigliere.
But ultimately Suzuki caved in because, he says, “The whole purpose of Studio Ghibli is to make Miyazaki films.” What will happen, then, when Miyazaki does retire for good? His older son, Goro, 54, has made a few films for the studio, including the entirely computer-animated “Earwig and the Witch,” released in the United States last winter to mostly critical reviews that took less issue with the film itself than with the break in Ghibli tradition.
Later, the director of animation begged him not to draw any new characters, so he came up with the idea of Yubaba, the coldhearted bathhouse operator, having a kindhearted identical twin, which turned out to be both a crucial plot point and a sounding of a favorite theme: that in all of us there is a duality and the potential for both good and bad.
In the English translation by Bruno Navasky, published in October, the boy gazes out at the city and is overwhelmed: “The watching self, the self being watched, and furthermore the self becoming conscious of all this, the self observing itself by itself, from afar, all those various selves overlapped in his heart, and suddenly he began to feel dizzy.” The actual content of the film could be anything — Suzuki has described it as “fantasy on a grand scale” — since Miyazaki doesn’t so much borrow stories as liberate them from their origins.
Miyazaki rubs the top of his head and lights a cigarette, one of his signature king-size, charcoal-filtered Seven Stars.