Hayao Miyazaki is probably the most famous name in the anime industry. He’s known for being an innovator and a pioneer. It’s impossible to talk about him without talking about the impact he’s had on popularizing the art of Japanese animation overseas.
He’s the proud co-founder and face of Studio Ghibli — the only animation studio to consistently make movies that people actually crave watching. Miyazaki’s films have been around since the 1960s, but he didn’t get his big break until 1988, when My Neighbor Totoro was released. After that, it was just one hit after another. He helped spread anime culture globally, but he also crafted some truly incredible films like Spirited Away (which won an Oscar), Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo.
Fans of Japanese animation all over the world were saddened to learn of his retirement in 2014, but it seems his passion for writing unique stories couldn’t be silenced for too long. In 2017, he came out of retirement to work on a new movie, How Do You Live?, which still doesn’t have a confirmed release date.
But Miyazaki doesn’t just make movies; he’s an incredible storyteller, and interviews and behind-the-scenes reveal some significant insights on animation and his views on life and the world. And that’s why we’re here today: to share some of our favorite quotes from one of Japan’s greatest minds! The following are some of the best Hayao Miyazaki quotes that will inspire you to live your life with passion and purpose and let you get to know Miyazaki better.
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"Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man."
"Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living."
"Our lives are like the wind... or like sounds. We come into being, resonate with each other... Then fade away."
I always like to dwell on the details, the process, the journey than the end game. The details give more meaning to the end.
"I would like to make a film to tell children 'it's good to be alive.'"
"If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era."
"Once you have met someone, you never really forget them."
"First, don’t panic, second, don’t panic, and third, DID I MENTION NOT TO PANIC?"
"Yet, even amidst the hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist."
"You may not like what's happening, but just accept it, and let's try to live together. Even if you feel angry, let's be patient and endure, let's try to live together. I've realized that this is the only way forward."
"Once born,there is no turning back. And I think that’s exactly why the fantasy worlds of cartoon movies so strongly represent our hopes and yearnings. They illustrate a world of lost possibilities for us."
"I think it’s really good for a family or children to have a dog, cat, bird or whatever to grow up with."
"Personally, I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby, you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making."
"I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love."
I feel this. I once wrote a story with a young man and woman classically falling in love. It felt forced and I rewrote them as friends, which I strongly believe improved the story.
"Always believe in yourself. Do this and no matter where you are, you will have nothing to fear."
"I can feel it every day, the limit of my ability."
"Stop trying. Take long walks. Look at the scenery. Doze off at noon. Don’t even think about flying. And then, pretty soon, you’ll be flying again."
"Problems begin the moment we're born. We're born with infinite possibilities, only to give up on one after another. To choose one thing means to give up another. That's inevitable. But what can you do? That's what it is to live."
"The greatness of a mind is determined by the depth of its suffering."
"When I have the time, I like to go up to a cabin I have in the mountains. Sometimes friends will come by to visit me, but I also like to spend time alone. It reinvigorates me, hiking those mountain trails. After working on a film, it usually takes half a year for me to recover my mental and physical balance. I have to set aside time to recuperate. I guess when you add it all up, I’m not really working that many hours."
"Nobody has the right to sit in judgment and decide what’s good or bad for you."
"In the past, humans hesitated when they took lives, even non-human lives. But society had changed, and they no longer felt that way. As humans grew stronger, I think that we became quite arrogant, losing the sorrow of ‘we have no other choice.’ I think that in the essence of human civilization, we have the desire to become rich without limit, by taking the lives of other creatures"
"Producing an animation series merely to fill time slots in the broadcast schedule is like generating cultural pollution."
"When I start creating a villain, I start liking the villain and so the villain is not really evil."
"Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them – waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things."
"We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation."
"I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women."
"In my grandparents’ time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere… in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything… I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything."
"Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves."
"The love of weaponry is often a manifestation of infantile traits in an adult."
"I like the expression ‘lost possibilities.’ To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, and a life. To exist here, now, means to lose the possibility of being countless other potential selves. For example, I might have been the captain of a pirate ship, sailing with a lovely princess by my side. It means giving up this universe, giving up other potential selves. There are selves which are lost possibilities, and selves that could have been, and this is not limited just to us but to the people around us and even to Japan itself."
In another life where a woman named after light and carried a rose, won, I wonder what world I will see with her as the captain of this ship.
"Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world."
"Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same."
Rebecca Sugar's song that goes "Everything stays but it still changes, ever so slightly daily and nightly in little ways everything stays." It made me learn that people, things, relationships, they change gradually over time. You may deny it but change is inevitable and yet their essence remains.
"Young people are surrounded by virtual things. Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions."
"My process is thinking, thinking and thinking—thinking about my stories for a long time."
And then never writing them. Damn! I hate that I'm too lazy to write some of the stories is think of. They're like little gifts for myself, a reflection of where I am in life and how I'm doing.
"I do believe in the power of story. I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze, and inspire their listeners."
"Whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul."
"Today, all of humanity’s dreams are cursed somehow. Beautiful yet cursed dreams."
"Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!"
"We get strength and encouragement from watching children."
"It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime."
"The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it – I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless."
"What you mean by ‘peace’ is nothing more than the endless repetition of human folly."
"I'd like more of the world go back to being wild."
"All my films are all my children."
I understand that. Same by mine are just novels and short stories. I've always thought that art in whatever form, is the manifestation of your soul.
"I am an animator. I feel like I’m the manager of an animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I’m rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work."
"It is the fate of modern life that we repeatedly lose touch with: nature, the environment, the planet. But we try to regain it again and again. It’s like a circle. In children’s hearts and souls when they’re born into the world, nature already exists deep inside them. So what I want to do in my work is tap into their souls."
"I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldn’t stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination."
"Since I am a person who starts work without clear knowledge of a storyline, every single scene is a pivotal scene."
"I wish I was better at art. I love some of the great artists of the 19th century and, compared to them, I just feel I lack this technique that they had. They have so much skill."
What is it thats people are already great at what they do and yet they still feel insufficient? Reminds me of Socrates saying that the wisest man in the man who knows he does not know. I interpret this as being able to see that gaps in your skills and therefore doing something to improve on it. And also something about humility.
"I think 2-D animation disappeared from Disney because they made so many uninteresting films. They became very conservative in the way they created them. It’s too bad. I thought 2-D and 3-D could coexist happily."
Gravity Falls, Owl House, and Star vs The Forces of Evil are gold. Takes the mundane out of life.
"I’m actually not that worried. I wouldn’t give up on it completely. Once in a while, there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You’re going to have people in the corners of garages making cartoons to please themselves. And I’m more interested in those people than I am in big business."
"In our work, the question is, how much you absorb from others. So for me, creativity is really like a relay race. As children, we are handed a baton. Rather than passing it onto the next generation as is first, we need to digest it and make it our own."
"The single difference between films for children and films for adults is that in films for children, there is always the option to start again, to create a new beginning. In films for adults, there are no ways to change things. What happened, happened."
"There’s an old saying, ‘Look not into the heart of the Ohmu.’ They say if you do, you’ll never come back."
"You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two."
"I try to dig deep into the well of my subconscious. At a certain moment in that process, the lid is opened and very different ideas and visions are liberated. With those, I can start making a film. But maybe it's better that you don't open that lid completely, because if you release your subconscious it becomes really hard to live a social or family life."
"Logic is using the front part of the brain, that’s all. But you can’t make a film with logic. Or if you look at it differently, everybody can make a film with logic. But my way is to not use logic."
"I don’t like games. You’re robbing the precious time of children to be children. They need to be in touch with the real world more."
"I never read reviews. I’m not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators."
"I don’t have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don’t have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keeping working on the film as it develops. It’s a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that’s the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it."
"The villains are all parts of me. For years I’ve been wondering what it would be like if all those negative elements were forced onto the main character’s side. I can understand a character with that kind of anger."
"Its not a story in which the characters grow up, but a story in which they draw on something already inside them, brought out by the particular circumstances. I want my young friends to live like that, and I think they, too, have such a wish."
"Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do."
"Virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people."
"There are so many ships in the animation sea that are computer driven, that I think we can have at least one that’s just a log raft that we can row by hand."
"I myself become terrified of death when I am in a negative state of mind. But the thought of death ceases to bother me once I become productive."
"When I say I get inspiration from my real life, I think of my real life as extending about 300 meters radius around me. So what I see in that area is what inspires me."
"I find it pointless sitting in my house not working, though I like to go on extended vacations from time to time."
"The principle I adhere to when directing is that I make good use of everything my staff creates. Even if they make foregrounds that don’t quite fit with my backgrounds, I never waste it and try to find the best use for it."
"I managed to work for more than 50 years with just paper, pencils and film. My son’s generation and the one coming up after can’t work with just paper and pencils anymore. I managed to avoid using a computer. I don’t even have a cellphone. I feel lucky I managed to live like that."
"Prizes do not mean anything to me. I think it is more important to make a child aware of the existence of a weird creature like a water spider that breathes through its backside."
"These days, there are angry ghosts all around us, dead from wars, sickness, starvation – and nobody cares. So you say you’re under a curse? Well, so what? So’s the whole damned world."
"Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over."
"To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures."
"The future is clear. It’s going to fall apart. What’s the use in worrying? It’s inevitable."
"It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes, that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me."
"The running of surging masses on fire with anger, the running of a child doing his best to hold back tears until he reaches his house, the running of a heroine who has forsaken everything but the desire to flee—being able to show wonderful ways of running, running that expresses the very act of living, the pulse of life, across the screen would give me enormous delight. I dream of someday coming across a work that requires that kind of running."
"Sometimes I test myself saying, 'If I get a death sentence if I don’t make this movie, would I still make this movie?'"
"From that rooftop, what if you leapt onto the next roof, dashed over to that blue and green wall, jumped and climbed up the pipe, ran across the roof, and jumped to the next? You can, in animation. When you look from above, so many things reveal themselves to you. Maybe race along the concrete wall. Isn’t it fun to see things that way?"
"People who design machines and airplanes {or buildings}, no matter how much they believe that what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into tools of industrial civilization. They’re cursed dreams. Animation, too. Beautiful yet cursed dreams."
"I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire – all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over."
"When you watch the subtitled version you are probably missing just as many things. There is a layer and a nuance you’re not going to get. Film crosses so many borders these days. Of course it is going to be distorted."
"At the time, sword and sorcery stories were quite popular. There were female warriors waving swords around as well, but the genre is populated entirely with people who have absolutely no responsibility to anyone, so I knew my story would have to be completely different from any of these."
"The characters are born from repetition, from repeatedly thinking about them. I have their outline in my head. I become the character and as the character, I visit the locations of the story many, many times. Only after that I start drawing the character, but again I do it many, many times, over and over. And I only finish just before the deadline."
"If someone were to ask me what the most important thing is when creating a new animated work, my answer would be that you first have to know what you want to say with it. In other words, you have to have a theme. Surprisingly, perhaps, people sometimes overlook this basic fact of filmmaking and overemphasize technique instead. There are innumerable examples of people making films with a very high level of technique, but only a very fuzzy idea of what they really want to say. And after watching their films, viewers are usually completely befuddled. Yet when people who know what they want to say make films with a low level of technique, we still greatly appreciate the films because there is really something to them."
"You always have to appeal to your audience. You always have to consider how well your project will do in terms of admissions. I abandoned many stories because of that. But I don’t get too down about it. It’s something I accepted from the time I decided to work in films."
"When a man is shooting a handgun, it’s just like he is shooting because that’s his job, and he has no other choice. It’s no good. When a girl is shooting a handgun, it’s really something."
"I think we should stop using nuclear power plants because it’s an old system that we can’t control."
"Rather than making that a good project, I like to make the kinds of films that children can understand in five minutes what the film is about."
