Miyazaki summed up why the boat of their friendship never turned over: "Because we don't respect each other. ”
| Author: Xu Xiaodi
Not long ago, a japanese animation ghost and director of "Ghost in the Shell" Mori Oshii made a Chinese version of the spit force, called "I don't want to say bad things!" No one dares to judge the merits of Ghibli".
The big three of Ghibli are like this in Oshii's eyes: Miyazaki is the "ancestor of otaku", "as an animator, he is a rare genius, as a director, but his ability is below the second rate"; Takahata is a "stinky intellectual" who "relies on intelligence and literacy to make movies"; and Toshio Suzuki, who leads the propaganda work, can be called a "master of intimidation" and "master of brainwashing". The bad words say a book, and the last affirmation really points out the meaning of Ghibli: it raises the status of animation to the level of cinema, and pushes the market of animation to a general audience.
In the summer of 2021, the long queue at today's museum's exhibition "Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli's World" may be proof of this. Children rushed into the Totoro bus, and adults also stood next to the Totoro waiting for the bus to take a group photo.
Today Art Museum "Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli's World" exhibition site.
Walking through the door of the exhibition hall, you are greeted by an enlarged photograph. Ghibli's big three– Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki, and Hoon Takahata – sit in front of the flower bed, with the small building behind it hand-painted, covered in thick mountain climbing tigers, full of greenery. That was what Studio Ghibli first looked like in 1985.
From left to right, Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki, and Takahata.
"The hot wind blowing on the Sahara Desert"
In 1958, at the age of 17, Miyazaki watched the first color animated feature film in Japanese history, "The Legend of the White Snake", was deeply moved, and curled up at the table and cried for one night. "That's it, this is what I'm going to do all my life."
Five years after graduating from university, Miyazaki entered Toei Animation as he wished, and became acquainted with his predecessor Takahata. This graduate of the University of Tokyo always walked into the company a second before he was late, sat down, took out the bread and ate it, making a loud chewing sound, and was nicknamed "Apu" (describing the way he ate in a big mouth).
Hayao Miyazaki (left) with Takahata.
Both were left-wing youths, enthusiastic about mass movements, fond of the French animation master Paul Gurrimo, fascinated by China's "The Iron Fan Princess", "Little Tadpole Finds Mother" and the Soviet Union's "Ice Queen", from politics to aesthetics, a hit-and-go. In 1965, Takahata's directorial debut, The Adventures of Sun Prince Halls, brought Miyazaki into the team. As a result, Takahata's procrastination extended the original 8-month production cycle to 3 years, and the funding soared all the way, and the box office was miserable.
Poster for The Adventures of The Sun Prince Halls.
After that, the two jumped ship, worked closely together, and parted ways. It wasn't until 1978 that a desperate editor who was asked to start an animation magazine within 3 weeks found them.
The editor's name is Toshio Suzuki. In 1972, he entered Tokuma Shoten and reported on special attacks, speeding parties, and strippers, and was preparing to make a big show, but he was transferred to the creation of the animation magazine Animage. Suzuki, who knows nothing about animation, asks three female high school students to inquire about the situation. From their mouths, he heard the "masterpiece" of 10 years ago, "The Adventures of the Sun Prince Halls".
Suzuki called Takahata. An hour later, Takahata was still nagging, with only one theme: I didn't want to see you. Then he gave the phone to Miyazaki, who happened to be next to him. Miyazaki was straightforward: 8 pages is not clear, 16 pages. Half an hour later, Suzuki decided to abandon the interview, thinking, "Who is this?" Unable to let go, he ran to watch "The Adventure of the Sun Prince Halls" in the middle of the night, and the result was greatly shocked.
He decided to visit the two freaks again. At this time, Takahata was working on "Little Trouble Chie", and Miyazaki was rushing to produce his directorial debut "Lupin III: Cariostro City". Suzuki ran to the interview, and Miyazaki Hayao Kwon, who did not have this person, buried his head until two or three o'clock in the night, and suddenly said: "I am going back, you will come back tomorrow at 9 o'clock." "At 9 a.m. the next morning, Suzuki went again. Until the third day, Miyazaki, who was immersed in the storyboard, asked the first sentence. In this way, Suzuki mixed with them and "felt like having two favorite girlfriends at once and then being together every day."
In those years, Miyazaki took the painting manuscript everywhere and introduced himself, but he was disliked by the mainstream at the time as "the subject matter is stale and has no box office". Suzuki reached out at this moment. In 1982, Miyazaki's manga Nausicaä began serialization in his editor-in-chief Animage. Set thousands of years after the destruction of industrial civilization, the story shows the survival duel between humans and the Rotten Sea Forest.
After a year of serialization, Tokuma Shoten was willing to pay for it to be brought to the big screen. This is Miyazaki's backwater battle. He wanted to ask Takahata to be a producer, and the other party "this can't work" and "that no" made a bunch of excuses to resign. In the izakaya, a drunken Miyazaki cried in front of Toshio Suzuki: "I have given 15 years of my youth to Mr. Takahata, and he doesn't want to help me at all." The next day, Suzuki went to Takahata and yelled at him, "What is Mr. Miyagi (Miyazaki was nicknamed 'Miya' by Suzuki)?" Takahata happily agreed.
Where is it made? The combination of "Miyazaki + Takahata" has long been famous - after making a work, it drags down a company. While searching hard, a company called Topcraft fell from the sky. In 1984, "Valley of the Wind" was released and was selected as one of the "Top Ten Movies" of the "Film Magazine" that year.
Stills from "Valley of the Wind".
Not surprisingly, Topcraft went out of business. In order not to "plague" their peers, they decided to do it themselves. Suzuki quickly went to the store to buy a copy of "How to Create a Joint Stock Company" and sold it now. In 1985, Studio Ghibli was founded. "Ghibli", arabic for "hot wind blowing in the Sahara," was once used by the Italian Air Force as the name of a reconnaissance aircraft and by aircraft enthusiast Hayao Miyazaki as the name of a studio.
"We don't respect each other"
The Japanese animation industry began to whirlwind. In April 1988, two of Ghibli's epoch-making works— Hayao Miyazaki's Totoro and Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies—were released simultaneously. At first, many people were not optimistic, and the manager of tokuma Bookstore made a big fire: "I thought there were only monsters, but I didn't expect to build a tombstone!" ”
Both works are imprinted with the director's childhood memories. In 1941, when Miyazaki was born, Japan was in the quagmire of war. His family ran a factory that produced Zero fighters, but his father never felt guilty about producing weapons of war. My mother was bedridden for many years due to tuberculosis, and she always said that "there is no cure for human beings." In his lonely years, comics were his only solace. In "Totoro", Xiaomei and Xiaoyue also lived in the Showa 1930s (1955-1965), and their mother lived in the hospital, but spent a warm and clear childhood accompanied by the patron saint of the forest, "Dodoro".
Stills from Totoro.
Takahata, who is 6 years older than Miyazaki, was a war veteran. During the "Okayama Air Raid," 9-year-old Takahata saw that "many of the bodies were soaked in tar and burned to black," and trembled so much that he couldn't even close his mouth. The worst nightmare of his life was placed in Graves of the Fireflies.
Stills from Grave of the Fireflies.
Because of poor publicity, the two works that won all the film awards that year added up to only 590 million yen (about 31 million yuan). After learning its lesson, Ghibli began its heyday of "interesting, meaningful, and profitable", breaking the box office records of Japanese films again and again.
In the exhibition hall, posters of Ghibli are plastered all over the walls. In those beautiful stories, there are footnotes to the times - "Valley of the Wind" is set in the nuclear race under the "Cold War", "Hal's Moving Castle" alludes to the wars in the Balkans and Iraq; in "The Changeable Tanuki", when the mountainous and densely forested countryside is swallowed up by the reinforced concrete city, the magic tanuki decides to fight back; after the collapse of the bubble economy, the Hanshin earthquake, and the Aum Shinrikyo incident, "Princess Mononoke" encourages everyone to "live"; at the turn of the century, people's desires and prejudices are rampant, only like "" Chihiro Ogino in Spirited Away was able to unearth the "power not to be devoured".
Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke.
Takahata's "The Changeable Tanuki Cat".
The exhibition also features 300 reproductions and designs. In general, to make a 90-minute animation, you need to draw 10,000 drawings; in Ghibli, sometimes more than 80,000 drawings are drawn. In "Goldfish on the Cliff", the 12-second shot of a jellyfish floating out of the water alone uses 1613 manuscripts; in "The Wind Rises", a 4-second shot depicting the Great Kanto Earthquake took the team a full 15 months to complete.
Ghibli design manuscript.
"Hayao Miyazaki is a master of entertainment, and Takahata is an artist." Toshio Suzuki said of his two partners, "If you want to be human, there is no cure for both of them. Burdened with the publicity of this animation kingdom, Suzuki once worked with the distributor who said that the Totoro poster was "dark and the audience didn't want to see it", and also had a fierce debate with Japan Airlines for advertising the big face of Polluk in "Porco Rosso" on the plane. But the hardest thing to deal with was those two people.
Miyazaki never wrote a script, stubbornly insisted on drawing hand-drawn storyboard drawings, and was extremely disgusted with CG (Computer Graphics). In order to allow Ghibli to use the computer, Suzuki bought the software for Japanese chess, successfully let Miyazaki "put on the set", and has been addicted to playing chess with the computer ever since. Until one day, Suzuki found a message note on the table: "I will not be fooled!" I don't play chess anymore. Fighting Takahata, the "son of a sloth" (Hayao Miyazaki), was equally difficult, and in order to cure his procrastination, Suzuki would fake a poster for the spring release of the film, and the film would be released as scheduled.
A trio in your youth.
"I want to poke everyone together"
In December 2012, Suzuki announced that Miyazaki's "The Wind Rises" and Takahata's "The Tale of Yukihime" would be released simultaneously the following summer.
Hayao Miyazaki's "The Wind Rises."
・Takahata's The Tale of Hui Ye Hime.
In "The Wind Rises", Miyazaki for the first time takes a real historical figure as the protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, the "father of the Zero fighter" in Japan. "The people who design airplanes, no matter how good their intentions, the winds of the times will transform them into tools of mechanical civilization and become cursed dreams."
The gravity of age began to manifest itself in Miyazaki. His grip was only half that of his youth, and his pencil was changed from HB to 5B. When creating, he grabbed his hair messily, his feet behind the chair shook, and he said gamblingly, "The storyboard will be finished, the movie will be finished, and the world will be finished."
While Miyazaki was in the studio and doing musical gymnastics regularly every day, Takahata on the other side could sit and never stand, and could lie down without sitting. The project for "The Tale of Yukihime" was proposed as early as 2005, and producer Yoshiaki Nishimura was in charge of the project from the age of 28, and was still doing it at the age of 36, and for 3 years, he only had Takahata In his dream.
The story of "The Tale of Yukiyukihime" comes from "Taketori Monogatari", Takahata Hoon depicts a flower and a tree in Japan with freehand lines in ink, and the number of pictures alone is 500,000. In the end, the 137-minute, record-breaking Ghibli film-length "The Tale of Hui Ye Ji" was not unexpectedly postponed.
・The Story of Hui Ye Ji.com.
In Japan in 2013, the "3.11" earthquake, the Fukushima nuclear crisis, the constitutional amendment incident, the natural disasters superimposed on the political turn, "this country forced us to turn to the right." "The old uncle of the security movement in the sixties" (Oshii Shouyu) could not sit still. Toshio Suzuki was interviewed and said that "amending the Constitution is the willful act of politicians", and Miyazaki was worried: "Suzuki can't be sacrificed alone, and everyone will be stabbed together!" So his "shouts" appeared in the newspapers: "Is there any reason to amend the Constitution?" They took Takahata and published a special edition of "Against constitutional amendments" in Ghibli's magazine Hotwind. These remarks, combined with the release of "The Wind Rises," made Miyazaki known as an "anti-Japanese traitor" by some netizens, who said, "I can't understand this old fool at all."
This year, the 72-year-old Miyazaki announced his retirement for the seventh time. When his wife heard the news, she snorted. Takahata said, "Although he said that this time he was serious, the possibility of remorse is also very large."
In August 2016, three years after retirement, Miyazaki approached Suzuki with a planning book for the new anime and told him he wanted to do a good job before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Suzuki teased him: "The storyboard is not finished, what if you die first?" "Don't say that, I won't be able to die."
In 2018, Takahata died at the age of 82. At the memorial service, Miyazaki recalled his encounter with "Apu" and cried bitterly as he spoke. He always felt that "Apu" could live to be 90 years old, and in the future, "when Suzuki and I die, the eulogy will be read by Mr. Takahata."
At Takahata's farewell party, Miyazaki (left) couldn't help but cry.
The wind from Ghibli is still blowing. In 2020, the theatrical version of "Devil's Blade" was released, surpassing the record of "Spirited Away" for 19 years and becoming the box office champion in Japanese film history. A reporter caught Miyazaki near his residence and asked him how he felt. Miyazaki said: "I'm just a grandfather who picks up the rags now, and it's more important to try to do my own thing well." ”
This is Hayao Miyazaki. Even the "black powder" Oshii Mori said, "I don't want him to live in peace and quiet at all." He could not live a simple retirement life like this, living in a country hut and painting, waiting for the children to come to him. If he becomes like that, I will feel very lonely. ”