I don’t think it’s depression. I think it’s that he has a career and a vision that keeps him going lol.
I hope everyone finds a job like that honestly. Work you enjoy and find meaningful and that you keep coming back to. They say that once you retire, your health declines faster actually.
No shade to people who work to live of course and plan to retire! But having a fulfilling life and career you can keep coming back to is a real treasure that you should hold onto when you can.
Look, I’m not gonna seriously arm chair diagnose world renowed animation directors over here. But some of the documentary footage of Miyazaki (especially in 10 years with Hayao Miyazaki and the Kingdom of Dreams and Madness) shows him…really struggling at times, especially between projects. He’s described himself as “manic depressive” in interviews as well. He smokes a lot, has a difficult relationship with his family, and generally seems to have an intensely cynical view of life.
Which seems wild, given how gentle and hopeful his movies tend to be. But I think that’s kind of the point for him. He uses his films to find comfort and joy in a world that he knows can be painful and difficult. Making hopeful and joyful films is a calling and a distraction, it’s aspirational.
It’s why we get memes like this-
He’s also exactly the embodiment of this-
Hayao Miyazaki once said one of his memories which severely strained his relationship with his father was when their town was going up in flames during WWII. He said when he was 4 years old, because his family was privileged they owned a truck, and as such were able to escape when the firebombs came. He remembered his uncle beating people off the truck who tried to climb onto it, and he remembered them passing a burning house with people calling for help, but his father didn’t stop and instead kept driving with his family. Miyazaki said for a long time he thought his father was heartless and uncaring. It was only much later in life he said he realised his father in that moment could only focus on saving what was HIS. That all he could do was cling to his OWN family and focus on saving the people that belonged to HIM. So that even if he truly wanted to help, at that moment he could not do more than just focus on keeping his own family together as they ran.
“I was born in 1941… and had a strong feeling in my childhood that we had ‘fought a truly stupid war’. Many times… I heard adults speak boastfully of the horrible things they had done on the Chinese continent. At the same time, I also heard about the extent of the horrors of the air raids [on Japan]. I heard many stories and I started to think that I had been born in a country that had done stupid things and I truly started to hate Japan.”
Before this revelation, however, Miyazaki said when he was a teenager he often argued with his father, trying to make his father acknowledge his responsibilities in the war as someone who managed a factory where they made war planes. He and his father often argued about this, because Miyazaki’s father himself had no patriotism and merely did the work for the good money it brought in (which ties into Japan’s economical difficulties before the war which is too much history to go into here) which meant he could remove himself emotionally from his work, whereas Miyazaki wanted him to acknowledge his part in the bloodshed. I cannot find direct sources to say otherwise, but I believe he also managed to reconcile this part of his father’s life, as Miyazaki has grown to love planes and flight for their own sake, removed from their function as tools of war. Which he illustrates in “The Wind Rises”.
He sometimes speaks of a Japan he hopes for in the future. One that turns further away from Nuclear power and instead refocuses on strengthening Japan’s bonds to its natural landscapes and beauties.
“… I started to understand just how much I love the plants and the natural world of these islands. If there were no people, I thought, the Japanese islands would be unbelievably beautiful. I became aware that it wasn’t the nation or the rising sun flag that I loved, but it was the land that is truly special.”
The doomer Miyazaki memes are funny… but they also make me a little sad. Because they are true, but most people forget why.
I feel a lot of people overlook the fact that Miyazaki is not the way he is for no reason.
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