it seems you have been influenced by director Akira Kurosawa. MIYAZAKI: I love director Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Even though I love it, the Japan that he depicts in that film is not the real Japan. My perception of Japanese history is different. That is why I felt I needed to make my own period drama with historical Japan as the setting, and

UMEHARA: I wrote a play called Gilgamesh that dramatized the Gilgamesh legend. I consider it to be my best work. The best works don’t always sell well, but I really think it is my best work.

It would be easy to solve the problems of human beings were we to label those who decimate forests and destroy nature as evil, base, and savage. On the contrary, the tragedy of human beings is that the people who try to push forward the most virtuous parts of humanity end up destroying nature. Unless we look at this aspect of the human experience,

The history of aircraft is mercilessness itself. Despite this, I love stories about aviators. I won’t discuss my reasons as they would seem like justifications. It is most likely because I have a streak of brutality in me. I feel I would suffocate if all I had was my daily life.

The manga format is so readily comprehended that it has become Japanese culture’s common denominator. That is the peril faced by Japanese culture.

MIYAZAKI: They are trying to shorten childhood, which is the best time of one’s life. I’m afraid the world of children changes when they learn how to read and write. From what I saw of my own children, when they didn’t know how to read and write and didn’t yet have the ability to grasp abstract matters, they were so free in making wonderfully inven

isn’t it strange to forget that and think that the problems of this world consist only of those between people? It is with this kind of awareness of the issues that I made Nausicaä and Totoro, but after that things took a strange turn. This refers to both the creative process and our psychological state. From our sense of crisis that unless we prot

The people in the ironworks are kind, but when San breaks in, they become very brutal. They surround her, taunt her, and try to kill her. Yet they are ordinary people. Seeing this, Ashitaka does not denigrate everything about them. Even though they have these traits, he tries to accept them. And he tries somehow to control the power of the curse on

I often hear from children these days that, “It’s a film, after all,” no matter what kind of film I make. Their feeling of mistrust has encroached on many areas. Young people no longer read fiction. Sales of illustrated children’s books have fallen drastically. At the root of these phenomena is this sense of mistrust. This is what leads to “crimes,