Hayao Miyazaki Quotes

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 would like to make a film to tell children "it's good to be alive".

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.

The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.

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.

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.

Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.

Life is a winking light in the darkness.

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.

Always believe in yourself. Do this and no matter where you are, you will have nothing to fear.

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'm not going to make movies that tell children, "You should despair and run away".

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.

Do everything by hand, even when using the computer.

Yet, even amidst the hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist.

But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.

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.

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.

The greatness of a mind is determined by the depth of its suffering.

Our lives are like the wind... or like sounds. We come into being, resonate with each other... Then fade away

We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.

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.

Cut off a wolf's head and it still has the power to bite.

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.

To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, a life. To exist here, now, means to lost the possibility of being countless other potential selves.. Yet once being 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.

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 you have met someone, you never really forget them.

Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.

See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good.

In this world of ours, the sparrow must live like a hawk if he is to fly at all.

[pitching the proposal for Mononoke-hime (1997)] There cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans. However, even in the middle of hatred and killings, there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist. We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. What we should depict is, how the boy understands the girl, and the process in which the girl opens her heart to the boy. At the end, the girl will say to the boy, "I love you, Ashitaka. But I cannot forgive humans." Smiling, the boy should say, "That is fine. Live with me.

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.

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.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

Producing an animation series merely to fill time slots in the broadcast schedule is like generating cultural pollution.

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.

Chihiro, huh? Her real name's Chihiro? Can't beat the power of love.

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.

[on the future of hand-drawn animation] 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.

Those are shrines. Some people believe spirits live in them.

Whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul.

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.

Stop trying. Take long walks. Look at scenery. Doze off at noon. Don't even think about flying. And then, pretty soon, you'll be flying again.

Personally, I was never more passionate about manga than when preparing for my college entrance exams. It's a period of life when young people appear to have a great deal of freedom, but are in many ways actually opressed. Just when they find themselves powerfully attracted to members of opposite sex, they have to really crack the books. To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own - a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they incorporate into this private world. I often refer to this feeling as one yearning for a lost world. It's a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it's that feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about anime.

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.

first don't panic, second don't panic and third DID I MENTCHIN NOT TO PANIC?!

Danger doesn't always come from the enemy.

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.

Utopia exists only in one's childhood life.

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.

Today, all of humanity's dreams are cursed somehow. Beautiful yet cursed dreams.

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 winds of time eventually turn them into the tools of industrial civillisation. It's never unscathed.

When I say 'hero', do not picture someone with strength to fight and conquer evil – because evil is not something that can ever be conquered or defeated. Evil is natural. It is innate in all humans. But while it can't be defeated... it can be controlled. In order to control it, and live the life of a true hero, you must learn to 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.

[...] it would be false to say that because we're on the side of justice, we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace. [...] Now, I know that there are such things as good and evil in the world, and that people do good things. But people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people who have done good things. The next instant they might wind up doing something bad, and if we don't take that into account in our view of humans, we'll constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves.

Jiji: [after hearing that Kiki plans on leaving town for her witch training] I'm going to put my paws together and pray that you're not serious!

On Hayao Miyazaki I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are. "We have a word for that in Japanese," he said, "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally." Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry? "I don't think it's like the "pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.

There are so many things we can’t do anything about if we think about generalities. Things won’t go well because there is a huge gap between the generalities and the particulars. If we see generalities from the top of a mountain or from a plane, we feel it’s hopeless, but if we go down, there is a nice road running about fifty meters, we feel this is a nice road, and if the weather is fine and shining, we feel we can go on… Since the people in the community are cleaning up the river in my neighborhood, I join them when I have the time. A human can often be satisfied with the particulars. That’s what I like best these days.

I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue.

Whoever falls, hatred will breed hatred.

I can feel it everyday, the limit of my ability.

I'd rather be a pig than a fascist

Of course I believe that other world exists. If they didn't life wouldn't be interesting. It's like love: you can't see but it exists-simply because you believe it. It's just a matter of believing.

One of the locations that showed up most frequently in Kira’s OASIS account logs was the planet Miyazaki in Sector Twenty-Seven. It was a bizarre and beautiful world that paid tribute to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator behind anime masterpieces like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Every life-form, no matter how small, contains the outside universe within it's internal universe.

Once you've met someone you really never forget them; it just takes a while for your memory to return

You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, "Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life." If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. 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!

Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old.

I have a strong desire to be liberated from being tied down to reality.

Ashitaka is not a cheerful, worry-free boy. He is a melancholy boy who has a fate. I feel that I am that way myself, but until now, I have not made a film with such a character. Ashitaka was cursed for a very absurd reason. Sure, Ashitaka did something he should not have done - killing Tatari Gami. But there was enough reason to do so from the humans' viewpoint. Nevertheless, he received a deadly curse. I think that is similar to the lives of people today. I think this is a very absurd thing that is part of life itself.

See that house with the Ivy on it? From that rooftop, what if you leapt onto the next rooftop, dashed over that blue & green wall, climbed and jumped up the pipe, ran across the roof and jumped to the next? You can, in animation. If you could walk along the cable, you could see the other side. When you look from above, so many things reveal themselves to you. Maybe race along the concrete wall. Suddenly, there in your humdrum town there is a magical movie. Isn’t it fun to see things that way? Feels like you could go somewhere far beyond… …maybe you can…

A veces creo que los dioses se burlan de nosotros.

A hearts a heavy burden - Sophie Hatter

Basically, I think I just want them to know that the world is deep and filled with variety. That there are infinite possibilities in the world they live in and that they are a part of this world. Perhaps it’s enough just to say that the world is rich and precious and that they hold it in their hands. I honestly made this film just wanting to tell these young girls, “Don’t worry, you can make it all right.

There's an old saying, 'Look not into the heart of the Ohmu.' They say if you do, you'll never come back...

If I were asked my view, in a nutshell, of what animation is, I would say it is "what ever I want to create".

Ever forward, my darling wind.

I really wanted to punish humanity, but I realized that I was playing God, and that didn't work.

To die with something to live for

inspiration unlocks the future

No, you can just paint me walking into shadows.

In order to grow...you must betray their expectations.

Normalizar el papel de la mujer en cualquier ámbito y exactamente a la misma altura que el hombre.

No puedo quedarme sentado en mi escritorio. Las ideas vienen de lo inesperado.

Extinction has long since become a part of our lives.

Maybe there was a time when you could make films that mattered, but now?

For me, the heart of a humanistic education is the effort to understand what we don’t agree with, and yes, understanding makes it harder to sustain a distance from others, even if I continue to disagree.

O que realmente importa são as emoções subjacentes - você não deve abandoná-las.

[On his father Hayao] He gets zero marks as a father but full marks as a director of animated films

The director and film critic René Clair spoke of cinéma pur, in which the allure of the filmic medium imparts an intensity that for a few moments brings the plot to a stop.

The film critic Roger Ebert once wrote: “I told Miyazaki I love the ‘gratuitous motion’ in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit there for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are. ‘We have a word for that in Japanese,’ [Miyazaki] said. ‘It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.

Kurosawa, who included My Neighbor Totoro on a list of his 100 favorite films, considered Miyazaki a role model for Japanese film culture: “It’s anime, but I was so moved….I cried when I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Osa: Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living

Narrator: In ancient times, the land lay covered in forests, where, from ages long past, dwelt the spirits of the gods. Back then, man and beast lived in harmony, but as time went by, most of the great forests were destroyed. Those that remained were guarded by gigantic beasts who owed their allegiances to the Great Forest Spirit. For those were the days of gods and of demons..

Let's live without being bound by time.

Surely there can be no more superficial people than the Japanese. They were not able to transcend the demon of economic development and as a result, we have the corruption of the world, the loss of ideals, and the worship of material things.

A personal movie is a frightening thing.

Storyboards augment the scenario, expand on its intent, and exist to be analyzed and eventually revised.

please find me in the future

Number is no strength, courage only is.