The creator of the Oscar-winning Spirited Away and now Howl's Moving Castle is profiled by the NYT's A.O. Scott.
While I expect to see Howl in the next few days, if you haven't seen Spirited Away, you should. It's a beautiful, gentle, wondrous film.
Anyway, an excerpt.
NOWADAYS, when we think of feature-length animation, our thoughts turn immediately to "Shrek" and Pixar (or less fondly, to "Robots" and "Madagascar"). The animated world, we've learned, is round - created in three dimensions by teams of computer wizards and enlivened by noisy, knowing references to American pop culture, past and present. It may seem somewhat paradoxical, then, that the world's greatest living animated-filmmaker - a designation that his fans at Disney and Pixar would be unlikely to challenge - is Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese writer and director whose world is flat, handmade and often surpassingly quiet. Not that Mr. Miyazaki, 64, is entirely indifferent to technological advances. Starting with his 1997 epic, "Princess Mononoke," he has used computer-generated imagery in his movies, though he recently instituted a rule that CGI should account for no more than 10 percent of the images in any of his pictures.
In an interview last week, on the morning before his latest movie, "Howl's Moving Castle," had its New York premiere, he spoke about the new technology with a mixture of resignation and resistance. "I've told the people on my CGI staff" - at Studio Ghibli, the company he founded with Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki in 1985 - "not to be accurate, not to be true. We're making a mystery here, so make it mysterious."
That conscious sense of mystery is the core of Mr. Miyazaki's art. Spend enough time in his world - something you can do at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which is presenting a sumptuous retrospective of his and Mr. Takahata's work - and you may find your perception of your own world refreshed, as it might be by a similarly intensive immersion in the oeuvre of Ansel Adams, J. M. W. Turner or Monet. After a while, certain vistas - a rolling meadow dappled with flowers and shadowed by high cumulus clouds, a range of rocky foothills rising toward snow-capped peaks, the fading light at the edge of a forest - deserve to be called Miyazakian.
So do certain stories, especially those involving a resourceful, serious girl contending with the machinations of wise old women and the sufferings of enigmatic young men. And so do certain themes: the catastrophic irrationality of war and other violence; the folly of disrespecting nature; the moral complications that arise from ordinary acts of selfishness, vanity and even kindness. As a visual artist, Mr. Miyazaki is both an extravagant fantasist and an exacting naturalist; as a storyteller, he is an inventor of fables that seem at once utterly new and almost unspeakably ancient. Their strangeness comes equally from the freshness and novelty he brings to the crowded marketplace of juvenile fantasy and from an unnerving, uncanny sense of familiarity, as if he were resurrecting legends buried deep in the collective unconscious.
