Blog post by Ansuman
“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.”
― Hayao Miyazaki
As a kid, I always imagined myself as a part of some animated world. Where I could be the person that I always want to be when I grow up. I remember that there were very few people who used to watch anime and who could really distinguish between an anime and a cartoon.
“Grave of the fireflies” was my introduction to Miyazaki’s art and it blew me away with the emotions and the depth the story had, and the animation style felt like a blend of things which are happening all at once and the second moment nothing is happening. The silence he uses in his movies are the crucial part for someone like me who is more comfortable with being surrounded by chaos and the sounds of a busy life.
And from here I started my journey into learning more about Hayao Miyazaki. I started exploring the style and the thoughts of the creator behind his works. The one thing that I found intriguing was how fond and close he was with the emotions that can be felt through any living being. In most of his works we can see how he creates a synchronization between humans and nature; for some frames nature is overwhelmed by humans while in other frames humans are overwhelmed by the laws of nature.
As far as I could remember the best thing, I always felt about his works are the hand-drawn sketches, this always made me feel closer to the core of Miyazaki’s work. His style always portrayed how passionate he was while he was setting up a scene for his movies, the hand-drawn face was always made me sobbing for not being like them and being curated like them.
Miyazaki always drew his characters with passion and the love for his form of art, that he experienced throughout his life and observed in his surroundings. Despite
struggling in his own aspect, he always curated his emotions and inked it so well that his art reached from young ones to the oldest.
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I have some friends who imagine themselves into the world of “Sanjay Leela Bhansali” but for me I always wanted to be inside a “Hayao Miyazaki’s” work, it doesn’t matter the character he would create me into.
And for the past few days AI has made it possible to transform yourself into his work which feels a bit disrespectful in a way. This article is not a not a rant in any way against the recent trend where every single person who has access to social media handle is obsessed with transforming their photos into the “Studio Ghibli” filters. But people should not just use a single line of sentences to demolish the art that Miyazaki has curated whole life. I just want people to be a bit sensitive towards the effort one person make and the things they sacrifice to get where they are.
