Starting Point 1979-1996 Quotes

“To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, a life. To exist here, now, means to lost the possibility of being countless other potential selves.. Yet once being born there is no turning back. And I think that's exactly why the fantasy worlds of cartoon movies so strongly represent our hopes and yearnings. They illustrate a world of lost possibilities for us.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point 1979-1996

“Personally, I was never more passionate about manga than when preparing for my college entrance exams. It's a period of life when young people appear to have a great deal of freedom, but are in many ways actually opressed. Just when they find themselves powerfully attracted to members of opposite sex, they have to really crack the books. To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own - a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they incorporate into this private world.
I often refer to this feeling as one yearning for a lost world. It's a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it's that feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about anime.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point 1979-1996

“[...] it would be false to say that because we're on the side of justice, we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace. [...] Now, I know that there are such things as good and evil in the world, and that people do good things. But people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people who have done good things. The next instant they might wind up doing something bad, and if we don't take that into account in our view of humans, we'll constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point 1979-1996

“If I were asked my view, in a nutshell, of what animation is, I would say it is "what ever I want to create".”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point 1979-1996

“And work that should be done lovingly by hand has been whittled away at within organized production systems that focus on straight work for hire.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point: 1979-1996

“Timing is at least as important as content, and for those in the audience watching the film their emotional state at the time can also determine the impact of the viewing experience. What’s important here is not whether the film has some sort of permanent artistic value. The viewers—and I include myself here—usually only possess a limited ability to comprehend a film and tend to overlook many important clues in it. But they feel liberated from their daily frustrations and feelings of being overwhelmed, are able to shake off their sense of gloom, to discover a feeling of adoration, of honesty, and of something positive that they didn’t know they had in themselves, and then return refreshed to their daily realities and routines. This, I think, is the true role of popular movies.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point: 1979-1996

“Storyboards augment the scenario, expand on its intent, and exist to be analyzed and eventually revised.”
― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point: 1979-1996