They came in droves, standing in lines four to five deep across, in rows of three, a massive coil that stretched tightly around the outside of the San Diego convention center. Like otaku in Japan for whom the cultural practice of pilgrimage—typically taken to different areas of the country—has come to mean a pilgrimage to an anime or manga convention, many of the fans at San Diego Comic-Con were on their own pilgrimage to see the Japanese animation pioneer and genius, Hayao Miyazaki.
Miyazaki, who is known for his feature length animation movies such as Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso, Howl’s Moving Castle, and his 2003 Academy Award winner, Spirited Away, visited California as part of the effort to welcome and promote his new movie, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.It was also a chance for Americans to honor the revered director.While at Comic-Con, he was awarded the Inkpot award for Excellence in Animation. During his visit to the University of California at Berkeley,later that weekend,the artist won the 2009 Berkeley Japan Award for his work for its role in broadening the understanding of Japan overseas.
Screenings of Ponyo took place in San Diego and Berkeley. Ponyo, which is about the friendship between a little boy and a goldfish, is currently Japan’s highest grossing film. The movie opens in the U.S. on August 14th in over 800 theaters around the country, a far wider release than Miyazaki’s previous films.
“Miyazaki reminds us that nothing in the world is asleep,” said Duncan Williams, chair of the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, during the Berkeley-Japan Awards ceremony. “Everything has its own life, its own history, its own animating force. [His films] are a gentle recognition of the animating force in each of our imaginations.”
Ponyoisn't the only Miyazaki production coming to the US; San Francisco manga publisher and anime distributor Viz Media will publish two Ponyo-related books: an oversized art book, and the three volume ani-manga which captures the movie in book format. Viz Media will also publish Starting Point, a book of Miyazaki’s essays that chronicles the first half his life and work from 1979 to 1996.
The creator, who has consistently and openly expressed his repugnance/antipathy for America, shunning the 2003 Academy Awards ceremony for America’s bombing of Iraq, received a foot-stomping, thunderous, standing ovation from a hall of nearly 6,500 Comic-con attendees. This enthusiasm was mirrored at the University of California Berkeley where Miyazaki spoke before an audience of 2000 with professor Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, in an onstage, two-hour interview.
Normally terse when speaking to the press, and reputed to be a misanthrope, Miyazaki opened up to the audience and proved to be a gracious—and loquacious—guest. He willingly shared his thoughts on technology, on the importance of hand-drawn animation, the importance of his staff (some of whom he occasionally models his characters after), and the need to treat manga as its own art form, not as a storyboard for an animation series.
“I think we can enjoy manga by reading manga.” Miyazaki said of his preference for creating original material for his movies instead of adapting a manga series. “If we can avoid making manga into anime, that would be better.”
In response to a comment made by Kelts on the filmmakers tendency to feature strong female protagonists in his movies, Miyazaki pointed to his animation studio, Studio Ghibli. “We have 22 new employees that we’ve hired as animators.” He said. “Only four are men. Now we are hiring 10 more animators from a pool of 22 candidates. But out of that pool, only one man is remaining. Because there are so many strong women out there now, I may have to start making movies about men.”
But the godfather of Japanese animation become somber when talking about the creative process, describing the world as a collection of numbers and paper, and the creator’s necessary struggle to reach beyond numbers and paper for ideas. During the Berkeley-Japan awards ceremony which took place before his onstage conversation with Kelts, Miyazaki said “Those of us who work in entertainment, in order to make our presence felt, we have to open a hole and put a small pipe through our piece of paper, and then go down the political paper, the economic paper—we have to start fishing way down below, where there is no paper. The only way we can really justify our presence and our work is to continue this effort, to make the hole and go deeper and deeper.”
Miyazaki will head to Los Angeles to promote Ponyo at a film festival before returning to Japan.
