Hayao Miyazaki - Starting Point: 1979-1996

John Lasseter talks about Hayao Miyazaki

I first met Hayao Miyazaki-san about twenty years ago in Los Angeles. He had just completed Lupin III: Th e Castle of Cagliostro. I didnt have the opportunity to see the whole movie; I just saw a small reel of clips. But from the little I did see, I was taken with the characters. I was also impressed with the energy and cleverness of the animation. I still think it contains one of the best car chases ever seen on film. The imagination invested in the movie really inspired me. I could tell someone who knew and loved animation had made it . Th e Castle of Cagliostro is so much more than taking a live-action film and making it animation. It took the medium and really used it to its fullest potential. Thats what always inspired me about every Miyazaki-san film Ive seen. Its like, Wow! This is someone who really loves animation as much as I do. That totally excites me.

I remember taking the clips to Walt Disney Studios and showing them to various people. This was probably back in the early 1980s. I had some friends on the organizing committee of the Los Angeles International Film Exposition and we worked together to get Castle of Cagliostro shown at Filmex [a predecessor of the American Film Institutes International Film Festival in L.A.Ed.]. I was thrilled to finally see it on the big screen, with a live audience. People just loved it.

I next met Miyazaki-san during my first trip to Tokyo in 1987, and I will never forget that experience. I was there to give a lecture at NICOGRAPH International, a Japanese computer animation and computer graphics conference. One of the people I met at the conference used to work with Miyazaki-san and he arranged a visit for me. After a long train ride, we finally arrived at Miyazaki-sans work studio. I was struck by all the beautiful background paintings hanging on the walls and had to ask him what movie he was currently working on. There was an enigmatic smile on his face as he showed me an animation cel of a cat bus. Of course it was from My Neighbor Totoro. I was so amazed just by that one single drawing of the cat bus. It was thrilling to see the imagination at work.

A year later, we finally got a chance to see the finished product. It was so incredible. How fortunate for us to have visited Miyazaki-sans studio while he was making such a wonderful film. Now Totoro is an important part of my life. I brought home a Japanese Laserdisc version of the movie that my five sons grew up watching. Later it was released in an English version for the U.S., and of course we watched that too. My sons actually prefer the Japanese version. The characters are so alive! The character of Mei, for example, is just one of our favorites.

I have used scenes from Totoro as teaching tools while giving lectures to Pixar animators. To me, one of the basic elements in defining the personality of an animated character is to show the same action performed by two separate characters. No one does the same thing in the same wayno one. By using this technique, the characters really take on a personality of their own. Theres one scene in Totoro when Mei and her older sister Satsuki are exploring their new house. Satsuki is running around and opening random doors. Then Mei comes in and does the same thing, but she does it like a young child. This scene tells the audience that Mei is the younger of the two girls. Nothing else needs to be said. Its so clear. These are two different characters, two different ages, doing the same thing, but in completely different ways. Ive always admired that particular scene, both for its simplicity and for the believability of the characters it portrays.