"The very first screening of 'Spirited Away' outside of Japan was at the Pixar animation studios," he said, "and I was stunned at how amazing this film was. North America hasn't had a chance to discover Miyazaki's films. In the animated community he's a hero, like he is to me."
Miyazaki and his partner at Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata ("Grave of the Fireflies"), have created work of astonishing depth and artistry; his "Princess Mononoke" was one of the best films of 1999. "Spirited Away," which won the Berlin Film Festival, has passed "Titanic" at the Japanese box office and is the first film in history to gross $200 million before even opening in North America.
The new film, which may be his best, tells the story of an 10-year-old girl and her parents who wander into a tunnel in the woods and find what looks like an amusement park. It turns, for the girl, into a "Alice in Wonderland"-type adventure, populated by a sorceress, ghosts, spirits, two-eyed dust balls, a helpful young boy, a boiler-room man with eight limbs, and a fearsome river creature whose body has sopped up decades of pollution.
When I went to talk with Miyazaki, who is 62, I reminded him that in 1999 he said he was going to retire. Now here was another film. "I wanted to retire," he said, "but life isn't that easy. I wanted to make a movie especially for the daughters of my friends. I opened all the drawers in my head they were all empty. So I realized I had to make a movie just for 10 year olds, and 'Spirited Away' is my answer."
Revealing. Many directors pitch their movies at 10-year-olds and then claim they are for the "whole family." Miyazaki makes a film that adults found fascinating at the Berlin, Telluride and Toronto festivals, and claims it is for 10-year-olds.
Speaking through a translator, he said Lasseter "turned into a human bulldozer" to assure the American release: "Without him I don't think we'd be sitting here."
Miyazaki, who is suspicious of computers, personally draws thousands of frames by hand. "We take [handmade] cell animation and digitize it in order to enrich the visual look, but everything starts with the human hand drawing. And the color standard is dictated by the background. We don't make up a color on the computer. Without creating those rigid standards we'll just be caught up In the whirlpool of computerization."
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