Only occasionally has he resorted to computer-generated imagery, and in some films not at all. (His own desk is hardly bigger than theirs.) He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself.

And unlike Walt Disney, the only figure of comparable stature in animation, Miyazaki, who is now 80, has never retreated to the role of a corporate impresario, dictating from on high: At Studio Ghibli, the animation company he founded with the filmmaker Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki in 1985, he’s always worked in the trenches, as part of a team of around a hundred employees devoted just to production, including key animators and background, cleanup and in-between artists, whose desks he used to make the rounds of daily for decades. From “ My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), with its vision of gentle friendship between two children and an enormous growling forest creature whom only they can see, to the ecological epic “ Princess Mononoke” (1997), whose title character, a human raised by wolves, first appears sucking blood out of a wound in her wolf mother’s side (the hero, an exiled prince, takes one look at her blood-smeared face and falls in love), to the phantasmagorical fable “ Spirited Away” (2001), in which a timid girl must learn pluck and save her foolish parents (who’ve been transformed into pigs) by working at a bathhouse that caters to a raucous array of gods, Miyazaki renders the wildest reaches of imagination and the maddest swirls of motion - the stormy waves that turn into eel-like pursuers in “ Ponyo” (2008), the houses rippling and bucking with the force of an earthquake in “ The Wind Rises” (2013) - almost entirely by hand. 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.įor, in an age of ever-advancing technology, his animated films are radical in their repudiation of it. Three little apples perch on a red brick ledge behind the stove. Sun burns through the branches of the trees outside.

THE SCREEN IS black, and then comes the first frame: Hayao Miyazaki, the greatest animated filmmaker since the advent of the form in the early 20th century and one of the greatest filmmakers of any genre, is seated in front of a cast-iron stove with a pipe running up toward the ceiling, flanked by windows propped half open. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

My neighbor totoro characters