The Beginning of Childhood's End -

 Miyazaki and the World of Animation

 

Hayao Miyazaki (born 1941) is one of the greatest directors to emerge from the Japanese animation industry, an industry that turned the country into a global animation superpower. His tenth animated feature, "Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea", recently released in Israel, summarizes three decades of directing film-features in Miyazaki's career, three decades that made him one of the most admired animators in the whole world: Miyazaki's many fans in Disney Studios paid homage to his works in several of their films - notably "Atlantis" and "Lilo and Stitch", as did the Mexican live-action director in his films "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth". John Lasseter, head of the renowned Pixar Studio (creators of "Toy Story") told that it was Miyazaki's debut feature "Castle of Cagliostro" through which he learned what animation is really capable of. Lasseter also noted that whenever the animators in Pixar face a creative block, they watch a Miyazaki film for inspiration.

 

Miyazaki's films are often praised for their positive representation of childhood, especially the childhood of young girls. The lecture examines three films directed by Miyazaki: "My Neighbor Totoro"(1988), "Kiki's Delivery Service" (1989), and the Academy - Award winner "Spirited Away" (2001) - and the childhood of each of these films' protagonist. As the lecture shows, common elements can be found in the heroines of all films, yet each film represents a different era in the history of post-war Japan, and Miyazaki's own life: the first decade after the war, the economic prosperity of the 1980s, and the uncertainty of the 21st century. Childhood in all these eras has a common theme - optimistic or pessimistic, it must reach an end.

 

Raz Greenberg is a PhD student at the Communication and Journalism Department of the Hebrew University, studying animation as a text, focusing on early Japanese animation as one of his case-studies. He has won an excellence award for his MA thesis titled "Images of Childhood in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki", served as a curator on the exhibition "Manga: Introduction to Japanese Comics" at the Yehiel Nahari Museum in Ramat-Gan, and published the essays "Three Adolfs: The Jews and Israel in the Works of Osamu Tezuka" in the history journal "Hayo Haya", and "Hayao Miyazaki and Europe" in the on-line periodical of the Israeli art school "Bezalel".