Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art

BY SUSAN NAPIER

YALE, 344 PAGES, $30

Never-Ending Man, a documentary that recently enjoyed a limited release in the United States, shows an exchange between the animator Hayao Miyazaki, seventy-eight, and a group of young programmers from an artificial intelligence company. The programmers proudly show Miyazaki animation of a "man" with a body soft as jelly--legs, arms, torso, head flopping like gummy worms--squirming and twisting across the floor, dragging itself along by its empty head. "It doesn't feel any pain," they tell their hero. "This is what we have been working on."

Miyazaki, a master of pencil, watercolor, and oil who has long resisted digital animation, is revolted--not only by the digital nature of the animation but by the broader contempt for life that the young animators express. He describes a disabled friend of his and says, "Thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted.... I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself." The programmers struggle to respond. The documentary cuts to Miyazaki sketching and mumbling to himself, "I feel like we are nearing the end times."

Hayao Miyazaki was born in 1941, the second of four sons. His father ran Miyazaki Airplane, a company that made rudders for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the Japanese fighter that hit the U.S. at Pearl Harbor. Utsunomiya, where the company was based, was firebombed in 1945, and as the city burned the family fled, huddled together in a flatbed truck. While fleeing the bombing, Miyazaki says, his father refused a ride to a mother and child who tried to clamber aboard as they sped away--"it was a woman carrying a little girl, someone from the neighborhood running toward us saying, 'Please let us on!' But the car just went on going." This memory (which is challenged by his older brother) has left a deep mark on Miyazaki, who accuses himself of cowardice: "I still think how much better it would have been if I had told them...