Quick Guide to the Amazing Characters You Will Meet In Hayao Miyazaki’s Worlds

The world-famous Japanese animation artist and director Hayao Miyazaki was born on January 5, 1941, which makes him 80 years old now. Miyazaki was one of the first animators to conquer the Western viewers with his kindhearted, kind of quirky, and sometimes deeply philosophical themes. In almost every Hayao Miyazaki movie, the viewers can find a few life lessons, some kids doing crazy things, mouth-watering food animation, and flying contraptions. Miyazaki just loves the things that allow people (and pigs) to soar in the sky. But let’s leave this for later.

Every scene looks very realistic and clean to the point that people call his animated movies “Japanese Disney.” Let’s look closer at some of the characters you’ll be meeting in Hayao Miyazaki’s worlds.

1. Flying machines

Something always has to fly in Miyazaki’s anime, and we don’t mean plain birds (get it?). We’re talking houses, castles, brooms, aircraft, strange insects, and other flying objects and structures. Why the fascination with this particular subject, you may ask? It turns out that Hayao’s father was the director of the factory producing aircraft components, and little Hayao spent a lot of time among the flying machines. Later on, the animator dedicated one of the movies, “The Wind Rises,” to his father. After its release, Miyazaki said that he was going to retire now, but as we all know now, he’s working on new movies and even called a press conference on this, but he had already done this before, so everyone is waiting for his next film.

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