Greenberg, Raz. "From Fan to Professional." Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’S Greatest Animator
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Greenberg, Raz. "From Fan to Professional." Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest Animator. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 1–30. Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501335976.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 07:14 UTC. Copyright © Raz Greenberg 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. C h a p t e r 1 F ROM F AN TO P ROFESSIONAL In 1958, at the age of 17, Hayao Miyazaki saw the fi lm that changed his life. It was the fi lm that led him to a career in animation, a career that would make him Japan’s (and one of the world’s) most acclaimed and infl uential animators, known as the director of such classics as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and the Academy Award winner Spirited Away (2001), as well as a source of inspiration for leading animation studios all over the world, such as the American studio Pixar and the British studio Aardman, among many others. Th e fi lm that set Miyazaki on this path was Hakujaden (literally translated as Legend of the White Serpent and later distributed in English- speaking territories under the title Panda and the Magic Serpent ). Miyazaki was not, by any means, the only spectator on whom Panda and the Magic Serpent has left such a deep impression. Th e fi lm was the fi rst Japanese feature- length animated color fi lm, and its commercial success hinted of Japan’s future as an animation superpower. Yet the great infl uence that the fi lm had on Miyazaki is noteworthy, especially since it was hardly his fi rst exposure to animation or popular illustrations. Born in 1941 to a well- to-do family that owned an airplane- rudders factory that thrived both during and aft er the war, Miyazaki had developed his passion for fl ight and airplanes from an early age, a passion evident in almost all of his fi lms. Another signifi cant childhood experience that infl uenced Miyazaki was his mother falling ill with spinal tuberculosis, and the threat of orphanhood became an important theme in his later work. Above all, Miyazaki’s formative years were marked by the fl ourishing of Japan’s manga (comics) industry, which off ered a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for Japan’s young readers in the diffi cult early years of the post- war era.1 Th e artist whose success has become synonymous with the rise of the manga industry is Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989). Tezuka, who had had a 1 2 Hayao Miyazaki passion for comics, animation, and drawing since he was a child, began his professional career as a manga artist aft er the war ended while studying medicine at Osaka University. Th ough he completed his studies, it was obvious that he was destined for a manga artist’s career: in 1947 his book Shin Takarajima ( New Treasure Island ), a graphic novel inspired by western adventure novels and fi lms, sold an unprecedented number of 400,000 copies, and became the fi rst of many classic titles Tezuka would produce in the following four decades. 2 Characters created by Tezuka, such as the boy- robot Tetsuwan Atom (known in English- speaking countries as Astro Boy ) and the brave lion Leo (known in English- speaking countries as Kimba the White Lion ), remain leading fi gures in Japanese popular culture to this day, and they were also the fi rst protagonists of Japanese comics to fi nd an audience in the west through the animated adaptations of their adventures. Tezuka’s success inspired many imitators, and his style soon became recognized as the one many people associate with “manga” to this very day: cinematic storytelling, featuring the breaking of single actions into several panels, successive pages that focused on visual storytelling that feature little or no text, and most notably the characters’ design—round, “cute” characters with big saucer- eyes. One didn’t have to look very far to fi nd Tezuka’s sources of inspiration for this design: a fan of the animated fi lms by Walt Disney and his greatest competitors, brothers Max and David Fleischer, Tezuka’s models for drawing characters were Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop. 3 Tezuka was not the fi rst Japanese artist to draw in this style either: during the war, Japanese animators drew in a style that closely mimicked the work of American animation studios—especially Disney’s and the Fleischers’—aware of the popularity of this style among the Japanese audience. Japan’s most ambitious propaganda epics produced during the war directed by Mitsuyo Seo (1911–2010), Momotar ō no Umiwashi (released 1943, the offi cial English title of the 2008 release by Zakka fi lms is Momotar ō ’s Sea Eagle ) and Japan’s fi rst feature- length animated fi lm Momotar ō no Umi no Shinpei (released in 1945, the offi cial English title of the 2017 release by Funimation is Momotar ō : Sacred Sailors ), also show the strong infl uence of American animated productions. Both fi lms carried a strong nationalistic anti- western sentiment: the titular character, a brave demon- fi ghting boy from one of Japan’s most beloved children’s fables, was presented in the fi lm as a sponsor of Japan’s colonialism in east-Asia, who both leads Japan’s animal army in war against the hated western superpowers and protects the native animal From Fan to Professional 3 inhabitants of an Asian jungle from the greedy ambitions of the same superpowers, also educating these inhabitants in the ways of Japan’s modern achievements. But it was impossible to mistake the inspiration for both fi lms’ character designs for anything other than American animation—Momotar ō ’s Sea Eagle even featured Bluto from the Fleischer brothers’ Popeye cartoons as the useless commander of Pearl Harbor, and the character also had a small cameo in Momotar ō : Sacred Sailors . Tezuka claimed that watching Momotar ō : Sacred Sailors was a major source of inspiration for his own work.4 Th rough Tezuka’s works, Miyazaki experienced his fi rst anxiety of infl uence. His fi rst attempts of drawing manga, at the age of 18, were compared by people who saw them to Tezuka’s style. Miyazaki, who at fi rst denied any such infl uence, eventually realized that his early works were indeed inspired by Tezuka, and this realization was somewhat traumatic: he collected all of his initial sketches, and burned them. 5 Th is incident started a rivalry of sorts between Tezuka and Miyazaki—a one- sided rivalry, for the most part,6 which focused on Miyazaki’s attempts to shake off Tezuka’s infl uence, fi nd other sources of inspiration, and develop his own style. Miyazaki found an alternative to Tezuka’s infl uence in another manga artist, Tetsuji Fukushima (1914–1992).7 All but forgotten today, Fukushima was a successful artist in the 1950s, whose fl agship series Sabaku no Ma ō ( Devil of the Desert ) was an epic swashbuckling adventure with an Arabian Nights fl avor set in a modern environment, spreading across no fewer than nine volumes. Like Tezuka, Fukushima found most of his inspiration in American illustrations, but he turned his creative attention to the less cartoony and more serious works on the other side of the Pacifi c: his realistic style bore more resemblance to Milton Caniff ’s newspaper adventure strips than it did to Walt Disney’s cartoons. Th e epic scope of the story along with the richly detailed designs of exotic landscapes and especially vehicles (cars, tanks, and airplanes) have been noted by Miyazaki as a long- standing infl uence on his own work, one that surpassed that of Tezuka. Miyazaki also had fi rst- hand access to foreign animation and comics—of the American kind that infl uenced Tezuka and Fukushima, at least. American comics were regularly brought into post- war Japan by American soldiers, and with the re- opening of the Japanese fi lm market to American fi lms, American animation—especially Disney features— literally fl ooded the theatres. And although by the late 1940s the Fleischer brothers were no longer running their studio (it was taken over by their 4 Hayao Miyazaki main fi nancier, Paramount, and produced inferior works under the new name Famous Studios), a new generation of young Japanese was just discovering their work; their 1939 feature- length adaptation of Jonathan Swift ’s satire Gulliver’s Travels became the fi rst foreign animated feature screened in Japanese theatres aft er the war 8 and a large volume of their short fi lms—Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman cartoons—was sold for broadcast on Japanese television in the mid-1950s.9 Th e Fleischer brothers have been another strong infl uence on Miyazaki, and he seems to have aspired to draw infl uence from the essence and themes of their work, while avoiding superfi cial design similarities to their fi lms of the kind that typifi ed Tezuka’s manga. Th en came Panda and the Magic Serpent . Like Tezuka’s and Fukushima’s work, it did not come out of nowhere; in fact, the fi lm’s roots in the history of Japanese animation and Japan’s visual tradition go far deeper than the works of both artists. Panda and the Magic Serpent was produced by T ō ei Animation, a studio established in 1948 under the name Nihon D ō ga (Japan Animation) by some of Japan’s veteran animators, including Kenz ō Masaoka (1898–1988) who pioneered the Attending a screening of Hakujaden (titled Panda and the Magic Serpent in English) at the age of 17 left a deep impression on Miyazaki, inspiring him later to seek a career in animation.