Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animator, film director, manga artist and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, widely regarded as the greatest animation filmmaker in the medium's history.
Born in Tokyo in 1941, the son of an aircraft-parts manufacturer whose planes haunt his films, he worked his way up through Toei Animation before co-founding Ghibli with Isao Takahata in 1985.
His films, including My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, are marked by flight, fierce and complicated heroines, ecological grief, and a refusal of simple villains; The Boy and the Heron brought him a second Oscar in 2024.
Readers know him above all for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the sprawling manga epic he wrote and drew across thirteen years, far darker and stranger than the film he adapted from its early volumes, and for Shuna's Journey, a painted watercolour fable finally translated into English in 2022.
His essay and interview collections, Starting Point and Turning Point, gather his sharp, contrary thinking on craft, childhood and the animation industry he has spent a lifetime both defining and berating.
He has retired, by common count, at least half a dozen times, and remains at work.
