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Miyazaki lives with his wife, Akemi, a former fellow animator - they met as colleagues at Toei Animation nearly 60 years ago on the movie “Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon,” and married in 1965 she stopped working to raise their two sons, at his request, and, he has said in the past, “hasn’t forgiven” him - in Tokorozawa, northwest of Tokyo, where the Totoro Fund (supported in part by donations from the Miyazakis) has purchased more than 10 wooded hectares, dense with oak and camphor trees, for conservation. (The forest of the film does not exactly correspond to the ravine, Miyazaki has said: “Rather, it is a depiction of the forest that has existed within the hearts of Japanese from ancient times.”)
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The oldest cedar there, 83 feet tall and nearly 54 feet in circumference, is believed to be more than 2,600 years old, making it one of the oldest trees on earth. (We speak through an interpreter, Yuriko Banno.) Japanese pencils are particularly good, he notes: The graphite is delicate and responsive - in the 2013 documentary “ The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness,” directed by Mami Sunada, he mocks himself for having to rely on a soft 5B or even softer 6B as he gets older - and encased in sugi (Japanese cedar), although, he muses, “I don’t see that many quality wood trees left in Japan anymore.” He adds, “That’s a true story,” then laughs, leaning in to the screen, and I think of the ancient, moss-cloaked trees in “Princess Mononoke,” cut down to fuel Lady Eboshi’s ironworks, and of their counterparts in the Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine on the island of Yakushima in the south, which Miyazaki visited while location scouting for the film. “I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil,” he tells me. Only occasionally has he resorted to computer-generated imagery, and in some films not at all. (His own desk is hardly bigger than theirs.) He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself. And unlike Walt Disney, the only figure of comparable stature in animation, Miyazaki, who is now 80, has never retreated to the role of a corporate impresario, dictating from on high: At Studio Ghibli, the animation company he founded with the filmmaker Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki in 1985, he’s always worked in the trenches, as part of a team of around a hundred employees devoted just to production, including key animators and background, cleanup and in-between artists, whose desks he used to make the rounds of daily for decades. From “ My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), with its vision of gentle friendship between two children and an enormous growling forest creature whom only they can see, to the ecological epic “ Princess Mononoke” (1997), whose title character, a human raised by wolves, first appears sucking blood out of a wound in her wolf mother’s side (the hero, an exiled prince, takes one look at her blood-smeared face and falls in love), to the phantasmagorical fable “ Spirited Away” (2001), in which a timid girl must learn pluck and save her foolish parents (who’ve been transformed into pigs) by working at a bathhouse that caters to a raucous array of gods, Miyazaki renders the wildest reaches of imagination and the maddest swirls of motion - the stormy waves that turn into eel-like pursuers in “ Ponyo” (2008), the houses rippling and bucking with the force of an earthquake in “ The Wind Rises” (2013) - almost entirely by hand.
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For, in an age of ever-advancing technology, his animated films are radical in their repudiation of it.