LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Hayao Miyazaki
built 608 days ago
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most highly regarded directors/animators/comic artists in Japan. His movies are beloved by all generations of Japanese people, and have enjoyed huge successes both commercially and critically. He started his career as an animator at Toei Animation Studios in 1963 and was involved with such popular TV series as "Heidi" and "Future Boy Conan." In 1979, he directed his first film, "Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro." He went on to direct the 1984 feature, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind," a highly sophisticated film that was as popular with adult audiences as it was with children. The success of "Nausicaa" led Tokuma Publishing to establish Studio Ghibli, a new animation studio for Miyazaki and his longtime colleague, Isao Takahata.
Source:
Directed by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, SPIRITED AWAY is the tale of Chihiro (voiced by Daveigh Chase), a young girl who is taken down an unusual road by her parents while moving to a new home in an unfamiliar town. The curiosity of Chihiro's mother (Lauren Holly) and father (Michael Chiklis) leads the reluctant child into what appears to be an abandoned amusement park. Soon her parents are greedily feasting on various delights from an enticing food stand and are literally turned into pigs. The frightened and bewildered girl then encounters a young man named Haku (Jason Marsden), who explains what she must do to navigate this strange and magical realm. Finding employment in a bathhouse for spirits and other odd characters--including kimono-wearing frogs, lumbering tentacled monsters, and a mysterious apparition named No Face--Chihiro attempts to figure out how she can free her parents from the clutches of the resort's owner, a powerful witch named Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette). In the process, she makes some very eccentric friends--and has to deal with some notoriously stinky customers.
Source:
Inspired by a passage in Gulliver's Travels about a floating castle, Hayao Miyazaki created the myth of Laputa for Castle in the Sky. Well-suited to younger audiences, it's a fast-paced adventure story filled with many daring chases, captures, and escapes. One of the first feature-length anim films from Japan to receive international distribution, the setting has a strange Western feel to it with Industrial Revolution-style machinery and Caucasian-looking main characters. Being an aviation adventure, a lot of the action takes place in the air, with wildly contrasting flying machines and thousands of propellers. The design is especially notable when they all get to Laputa, which has a futuristic structure amazingly in tune with the natural surroundings. In this film, it seems that Miyazaki is developing the ecological themes, morally complex characters, and fantastic settings that he often returns to.
Source:
Hayao Miyazaki is regarded as one of the greatest creators of animated films, and his work certainly stands as some of the best the genre has to offer. Miyazaki began as a low-level animator for children's cartoons such as Gulliver's Space Travels, eventually becoming director and key animator on many films and series, including Future Boy Conan and The Castle of Cagliostro. He frequently collaborated with Isao Takahata, director of Grave of the Fireflies. Miyazaki and Takahata co-founded Ghibli Films, a name that would become synonymous with quality. Miyazaki's works with Ghibli contained more of his own personal vision. Beginning with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, his films took on a softer touch and often included the adventures of young girls.
Source:
Miyazaki often alludes to environmentalism, a theme explored in a number of his films. In an interview with The New Yorker, Miyazaki claimed that much of modern culture is "thin and shallow and fake", and "not entirely jokingly" looked forward to an apocalyptic age in which "wild green grasses" take over.[13] Nonetheless, he suggests that adults should not "impose their vision of the world on children."[10]
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Hayao Miyazaki