The famous floating ship from Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle.
For the very last time, for there have been a number of retracted announcements, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement from filmmaking.
Miyazaki’s final film The Wind Rises will hit Australian cinemas in 2014.
Known for his whimsical characters and moralistic storylines, Miyazaki’s films explore humanity’s relationship with nature and technology, and tend to adopt pacifist ethics.
His films often have a strong female protagonist, such as in Japan’s highest grossing film in history, Miyizaki’s Spirited Away, the story of a young girl, Chihiro, who enters a magical spirit world.
When Miyazaki began writing Spirited Away he was inspired by a friend’s 10-year-old daughter and wanted to create a story not where the protagonist grows from child to adult, but a story where the child protagonist evolves through what is already inside them.
Miyazaki has been quoted as saying he wanted his young friends to live like that, using what is already inside them, and he believed they also had such a wish.
Spirited Away might appear to be a coming-of-age story, but beneath the surface of Chihiro’s journey the film strongly reflects Miyazaki’s recurring themes of pollution and the negative effects of gluttony.
Taking a break from his usual production style in 2004, Miyazaki scripted and directed Howl’s Moving Castle, an animation film adapted from a novel of the same name by Dianna Wynne Jones.
While the film was nominated for the Academy Award Best Animation Feature in 2006 and despite the film being quite drastically different to the novel, long-time Miyazaki fans were disappointed, as it was not a true original Miyazaki work.
Despite Miyazaki not writing the original story himself, Howl’s Moving Castle still rung true to the Miyazaki values: remembering not to judge by appearances, war is never the answer, and never judge a book by its cover.
It is the positive and hopeful messages depicted in Mikazaki’s films that bring the audience back time and time again. He cares for the environment, he encourages a healthy lifestyle, he puts females in leading roles and promotes the notion of staying true to yourself, just as Miyazaki has done so himself in all of his films throughout his career spanning more than 50 years.
Miyazaki’s most loved films will be shown at the Astor Theatre from November 2 in celebration of the filmmaker’s successful career.
