Happy Birthday Hayao Miyazaki! (January 5, 1941)
“Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿]) is a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter, animator, author, and manga artist. Through a career that has spanned five decades, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker of anime feature films and, along with Isao Takahata, co-founded Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio.
Born in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Miyazaki began his animation career in 1963 when he joined Toei Animation. From there, Miyazaki worked as an in-between artist for Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon, where he pitched ideas that eventually became the film’s ending. He continued to work in various roles in the animation industry until he directed his first feature film, The Castle of Cagliostro, a Lupin the Third story, released in 1979. After the success of his next film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), he co-founded Studio Ghibli, where he continued to produce many feature films.
While Miyazaki’s films have long enjoyed both commercial and critical success in Japan, he remained largely unknown to the West until Miramax Films released Princess Mononoke in 1997. Princess Mononoke was briefly the highest-grossing film in Japan until it was eclipsed by another 1997 film, Titanic, and it became the first animated film to win Picture of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards. Miyazaki’s next film, Spirited Away (2001), won Picture of the Year at the Japanese Academy Awards, and was the first anime film to win an American Academy Award.
In November 2014, Miyazaki was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his impact on animation and cinema. He is the second Japanese filmmaker to win this award, after Akira Kurosawa in 1990. In 2002, American film critic Roger Ebert suggested that Miyazaki may be the best animation filmmaker in history, praising the depth and artistry of his films.”
Watch/get his works here
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