How Hayao Miyazaki Keeps Making Films That Feel Timeless

Hayao Miyazaki retired, then un-retired, then released The Boy and the Heron at age 82, and it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The film was his most personal work, a dense, surreal meditation on grief, creativity, and legacy that refused to explain itself. It was challenging, beautiful, and completely unconcerned with whether Western audiences would understand it.

The release of The Boy and the Heron tells you how much leverage he has. In Japan it opened on 14 July 2023 with no trailer, no television spots and no clips. One poster of a bird, and nothing else. Producer Toshio Suzuki ran the campaign as a deliberate blackout and the film still topped the box office that opening weekend. Try getting that signed off anywhere outside Ghibli.

Studio Ghibli's production process under Miyazaki is famously labor-intensive. Every frame is hand-drawn, a process that most studios abandoned decades ago in favor of digital efficiency. Miyazaki's insistence on hand-crafted animation is not nostalgia. It produces a visual warmth and texture that CGI cannot replicate, a slight imperfection in every line that reads as life.

The working method is the part nobody copies. Miyazaki draws the storyboards himself and production begins before the story has an ending, which means several hundred people animate towards a conclusion he has not written yet. If you want to watch it happen, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Mami Sunada's 2013 documentary, spent a year inside the studio and shows him drawing, smoking, and telling his own staff their work is not good enough.

His storytelling philosophy rejects the Western three-act structure in favor of what he calls ma, the Japanese concept of emptiness or pause. His films include moments where nothing happens narratively but everything happens emotionally. A character staring at rain. A quiet meal. These breathing moments give his stories a rhythm that feels closer to how memory actually works.

The environmental themes in his work have aged into prophecy. Princess Mononoke's warnings about industrial destruction, Nausicaa's polluted earth, Ponyo's rising seas. What felt like fantasy in the 1980s and 1990s now reads as documentary. Miyazaki has been making climate films for 40 years, long before the phrase entered mainstream conversation.

Two corrections for newcomers. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is not a Ghibli film. It came out in 1984, was made at Topcraft, and its success is what paid for the studio to be founded the year after. And do not start anyone with Spirited Away. My Neighbour Totoro, from 1988, runs 86 minutes with almost no plot and no villain at all, and it is the film that tells you fastest whether his rhythm works on you.

What truly makes Miyazaki's films timeless is his refusal to condescend. He makes films for children that do not simplify the world. Villains have reasons. Heroes have flaws. Endings are bittersweet. He trusts young audiences with complexity, and in return, those audiences carry his films with them for the rest of their lives. There is no one else like him.

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