Half-hidden in a public park in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, the Studio Ghibli museum is not quite Disneyland. It's not at all like it, in fact. The size of a large detached house, it has just 10 rooms and no rides, although you can board a stuffed-cat bus if you're small enough to fit inside the windows. The best exhibits are not much more than piles of overflowing ashtrays, jumbles of books, huddles of knick knacks and dozens and dozens of drawings. It's less like a theme park, more like an exhibition celebrating the Untidy Victorian Of The Year.
According to the museum's literature, the rooms belong to an anonymous individual. The abandoned offices are there simply to show visitors how animators work. Every visitor knows that's not entirely true, though. They know that just like everything else at Studio Ghibli, this anonymous character is more than partially inspired by the passions and talents of Hayao Miyazaki, perhaps the world's pre-eminent animator. But soon, just as in his museum (whose building he designed himself), the 73-year-old Miyazaki is about to vacate his desk. The great man has retired from making films and an awful lot of people are wondering what will happen next.
To recap, Studio Ghibli is the animation studio founded by Miyazaki and his partner Isao Takahata in Tokyo in 1985. Over the 29 years that followed they have released 19 full-length feature films, eight of them directed by Miyazaki. Of these, 2001's Spirited Away is the biggest film of all-time in Japan and was the first to gross $200m worldwide before opening in North America (it also won the Oscar for best animated film). When Japanese consumers are polled as to their favourite brands, they often put Ghibli top, ahead of Toyota and Sony. But Ghibli's importance in its home country goes beyond financial success; in a way it has helped to define a sense of national character, creating new fables for the country such as the environmental parable Princess Mononoke. Ghibli has come to stand for both an aesthetic and moral code, continuing the practice of hand-drawn animation as everything else turns digital and creating stories for children that offer a more complex morality – and have a more vivid imagination – than its peers.
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This month sees the UK release of Miyazaki's final film as a director, The Wind Rises. It tells the story of Jiro, a young boy in love with the concept of flight. An idealist and a dreamer, Jiro's innocent passion takes him to the top of his profession, but it also leads him to invent the Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane, a catastrophic instrument of war. The Wind Rises, based in part on the real-life inventor of the Zero fighter, Jiro Horikoshi, has received rapturous critical notices. It has also proven politically contentious both in Japan and America; at home for being anti-war and "anti-Japanese" and abroad for apparently absolving Jiro of guilt for his actions. Fans of Miyazaki's work may find it something of a departure, more adult in tone and certainly light on the fantastical creatures that usually populate his films (unlike in the earlier Porco Rosso, at no point do any of the pilots turn into pigs). But they will also find themes that are familiar: a belief in the virtues of pacificism and the glory of nature; a hero that will not waver from his path. And if you wondered whether Miyazaki sees anything of himself in his protagonist, you will find that Jiro, just like his creator, wears glasses that look like sawn-off Coke bottles.
"We exaggerated the glasses; we exaggerate a lot," says Kitaro Kosaka, the man who worked most closely with Miyazaki's vision as supervising animator on The Wind Rises. "A lot of research went into it, too; we would compile portraits of Jiro Horikoshi and other photos of that era, but we didn't want just to reproduce. We would try to match the research with our own designs, try to blend it in so it would be coherent and seamless. It was a very interesting process for me. I don't wear them, but Miyazaki-san has very big glasses and has a sort of complex about it. I would say he's projecting a part of himself on to that character."
Kosaka and I are talking in the offices of Studio Ghibli itself, an almost laughably humble campus a few miles down the road from the museum. Comprised of just four small buildings (Studios 1, 2, 3 and 5, the reason for the missing 4 being a company secret), it's nestled in a street of tiny houses and rusting minivans. There's also somebody else's garden centre right in the middle of it. It's not quite Pixar's sprawling California HQ with its scooters and complimentary breakfast bars. But, again, that's how Miyazaki likes it.
"Miyazaki's philosophy is defined by the way he responds to fear," Kosaka says. "When a normal person encounters something that scares them they might try to run away. When Miyazaki encounters something he will be very brave and very bold and try to look them right in the eye. When life is hard in reality you still have to live up to high standards, to be proud. There is a saying we have that when a samurai has no food he will still use a toothpick. Miyazaki-san has that philosophy and hates anybody who isn't like that. He wouldn't have any characters like that in his movies."
Amid the domestic controversy over The Wind Rises, there was a sense that Miyazaki had been out of step with contemporary Japan (He rarely does interviews). His movie was accused of preaching pacifism just as prime minister Shinzo Abe was looking to revise a pacifist clause out of the Japanese constitution. Miyazaki responded typically, devoting the entirety of Ghibli's house journal to a rebuke of militarism. It only earned him more rancour. Kosaka, meanwhile, observes that the young animators are not always as determined as Miyazaki to preserve the cel animation traditions that have made Ghibli distinct ("For some people it's their dream job to work at Ghibli, for others they're not interested"). Most talented young animators now head straight to Japan's gaming industry.
If Ghibli and Miyazaki are so synonymous, can one survive without the other? Nick Park is one of the few animators who could be considered a peer; his Shaun The Sheep is graffitied on the wall of the Ghibli Museum's projection room. He says that Miyazaki's beliefs are not outmoded because they stem from a deeper place. "I'm not anti-technology, but he does remind you of the importance of the artist's hand, and a certain charm comes through in his work. His love of the art is there – and it's attractive, not mathematical. He has taken care about every shot and is enjoying the animation. Miyazaki is not afraid of wide-open spaces with nothing happening and wind in the clouds. This is refreshingly different from the Hollywood model and takes you to a different place inside yourself."
That "different place" remains a distinct offering. With a fallow summer for the studio this year, domestic rivals still feel compelled to market themselves as the Ghibli alternative. Its international reach also continues to grow (the studio has just opened its first foreign office, in Hong Kong). On the day I visit, the Ghibli museum is host to a sizeable American school party. The 16-year-olds are all, without exception, on their phones. But those just slightly younger than them, those less concerned with looking cool perhaps, are rattling between the rooms wide-eyed and deep in conversation. Miyazaki's passion and imagination speaks directly to them, no matter the generational or geographical difference. It's that magic that's going to be missed.
The Wind Rises is in UK cinemas from 9 May
Anime Magic: Five great Miyazaki films
My Neighbour Totoro
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In which Miyazaki finds enchantment in ordinary country life and the supernatural wonders hidden within in it (which are only visible only to children). It's all so beautifully detailed and generously inquisitive, there's barely any need for a story. What plot there is involves a single dad, a sick mum, two curious little girls, and a big cuddly forest spirit that goes "Raaaaaaaaar!"
Castle In The Sky
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Rip-roaring aerial adventures as good-natured sky pirates, flying robots and evil military flying machines battle it out to find a mythical floating city, with two innocent kids caught in the middle. Relentlessly pacy, jokey in tone and packed with invention, it's the sort of fantasy Hollywood would have milked into a six-film franchise by now.
Princess Mononoke
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Darker and more complex than Castle In The Sky, a mythical, epic tale of spirits, demons, giant beasts and destructive humans that goes for something more shaded than straightforward heroes v villains narrative (the princess of the title is a wolf-riding warrior savage, for example). It's as wondrous and imaginative as any Miyazaki fantasy, but somehow deeper and sadder, too.
Kiki's Delivery Service
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Apprentice witch Kiki was discovering the thrills of broomstick-riding before Harry Potter became an orphan. Her supernatural coming of age is less an epic battle than a gentle joyride through a sunny quasi-European realm and the ages of womanhood that await her. Typically full of airborne action, but refreshingly girl-centric.
Spirited Away
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Miyazaki lets his imagination loose on a psychedelic wonderland with its own bizarre logic. The setting is a bathhouse for the spirits, where a young girl's enforced labour pitches her into encounters with talking frogs, radish spirits and disembodied heads, not to mention some mucky confrontations with the clientele. It's a spiritual parable of consumption, gluttony and identity, wrapped in a funfair acid trip.
Steve Rose
