Book review: Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest Animator

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) can be safely listed among the most written-about professionals in the history of animation. The international literature about him and his works has been steadily growing, especially after Spirited Away (2001) won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Of course, as so often happens in the case of scholarly relevant artists who are also pop icons, fan books take up a good portion of this written production. This is especially true for countries that were early in broadcasting animated series and films involving Miyazaki. With their quality and broad appeal, such products easily found a special place in the memories of a generation that is now writing about his work. This happened in France and Italy, for example, where pre-Studio Ghibli TV series such as Arupusu no Shōjo Heidi (Heidi, Girl of the Alps, 1974) and Akage no Anne (Anne of Green Gables, 1979), directed by Isao Takahata (1936–2018) with Miyazaki serving as layout artist, and even Miyazaki’s Mirai Shōnen Conan (Future Boy Conan, 1978), stood out among the anime TV series that invaded the early morning and afternoon programming of those countries in the late 1970s to early 1980s.

Israel, too, was among the countries whose children had the chance to watch the early Miyazaki works almost at the time of their first release. Raz Greenberg was a member of that fortunate audience, as he reveals in the preface to Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest Animator. But this book is not a fan work. Greenberg, here authoring his first monograph, has always expressed his longstanding interest in Miyazaki both with scholarly articles and writings for the popular press; he is also an active contributor to the mailing list of the Nausicaa.net online database (known as GhibliWiki since 2008 but, established in 1996, the mailing list has its origins in 1991). One cannot be mistaken, though, in attributing this book to the scholarly lineage of writings on Miyazaki that had a watershed moment in the English language in Helen McCarthy’s Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (1999), the first monograph on the director written in a Western language in the wake of the sensation stirred by the US release of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997). More than two decades after McCarthy’s book, not only have the English volumes on the topic grown in number (the ‘Guide to Further Research’ at the end of Greenberg’s book comments on a few of them), but some Japanese works have even been translated into English, including first-hand sources like the artbooks of Ghibli films and Miyazaki’s essay collections Starting Point: 1979–1996 (VIZ, 2009) and Turning Point: 1997–2008 (VIZ, 2014).

Greenberg finds a way to fit into this panorama by choosing an original topic. As the book title states, this is an in-depth look at the beginnings of Miyazaki, with a focus on the works he contributed to and not much on the biography of the director, which is referenced only when it is pertinent to the discourse. As such, the book aptly fills a gap in the literature (both popular and academic) that up to this point has tended to deal with the later achievements of the director, after the foundation of Studio Ghibli in 1985. Greenberg’s book takes the important perspective that, by that time and at the age of 44, Miyazaki was already an accomplished animator and director.

The book consists of six chapters that do not follow a strict chronological order, but rather the thematic and/or productive affinity among different works. After a first chapter dedicated to the series and films where Miyazaki honed his animation skills (‘From Fan to Professional’), in chapter 2, Greenberg deals with the Calpis/World Masterpiece Theatre TV series, including the aforementioned Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Anne of Green Gables. Chapter 3 (‘Lupin, Our Man’) moves back and forth in time to discuss Miyazaki’s co-direction of the first Rupan Sansei (Lupin III) TV series (1971), that happened before the series explored in chapter 2, as well as his first full-length feature, Rupan Sansei: Kariosuturo no Shiro (Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, 1979). Similarly, Future Boy Conan (1978) gets an introduction only in chapter 4 (‘To the Valley Below’), so as to demonstrate how it constituted one of the premises to the first feature that Miyazaki based on a story and characters of his own, Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984). Curiously, chapters 5 and 6 (‘Bringing It All Together: Studio Ghibli’ and ‘Growing Old in an Uncertain Present’) might seem to contradict the title of the book as they sketch a profile of Miyazaki’s productions up to the present day, but they actually elaborate on the consequences of the choices Miyazaki made during his early career.

There are a few traits of Greenberg’s book that give a glimpse of the fan behind the scholar. For example, a 1976 Calpis/World Masterpiece Theatre series, Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri (3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother), gets special emphasis in a section of its own at the end of chapter 2. In the preface, Greenberg is adamant about his own personal attachment to this series and the childhood memories he derived from it. Then, there is the communicative and amiable tone of Greenberg’s prose, which is a sure sign of his experience in interacting with a popular audience. These are by no means shortcomings but, rather, welcome touches that gently balance the academic stance with a bit of personality and charm, making the book accessible and pleasant to read.

In terms of research and methodology, it must be said that, apart from some necessary contextual information, the book is not so much about animation style or aesthetics as it is about narrative strategies and content analysis. Greenberg opts to reference the visual and directorial style of Miyazaki only seldom and at a very basic level, while instead perusing in detail the stories he has been telling and supporting his points with a bibliography that commendably includes Japanese sources. Plot summaries and commentaries are among the main tools of the discourse, in the service of what can be considered the major achievement of the book: the reconstruction of a genealogy of narrative forerunners – in literature, film and comics – that shaped Miyazaki’s storytelling and characters. With a keen and convincing comparative ability, Greenberg trails even the tiniest cross-pollinations between Miyazaki’s imagination and other works to show how they progressively integrated into a single vision. For example, it is enlightening to see how vast the influence on Miyazaki was of Paul Grimault’s film La Bergère et le Ramoneur (The Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird, 1955, later finished as Le Roi et l’Oiseau, 1980). When he was an in-betweener at Tōei Animation in the 1960s, Miyazaki found himself working on features that were already taking after that French model. He perpetuated that reference when he became a director, and the influence can be seen from Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro to Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004).

While most of Miyazaki’s references, like the Grimault one, are not exactly news to connoisseurs of the director, this is the first time they have been systematically discussed. Moreover, other than exposing the inner workings of Miyazaki’s narrative creativity, Greenberg’s research makes for a good historical contextualization of the director’s career. In this respect, the book can easily become a teaching tool for courses in animation history. The plentiful mentions of animated works can provide the students with a good picture of how Miyazaki is situated in relation to other important authors and studios, while also giving them a chance to get curious about less famous works that might not have been introduced in class.

In all, Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring the Early Work of Japan’s Greatest Animator is a solid and enjoyable critical description of the roots of Miyazaki’s storytelling that will appeal to scholars, students and fans alike.