Toshio Suzuki is a co-founder of Studio Ghibli and frequent Miyazaki collaborator, as well as the godfather of anime fandom. © 2002 Nibariki. TGNDDTM. All rights reserved.

The Rise of A Master
Miyazaki was already a twenty-year veteran animator by this time. He was born in Tokyo on January 5, 1941. He joined the Toei Animation Company staff in 1963, rising from in-betweener to key animator on both theatrical and TV series projects. Among Toei's other young animators was Isao Takahata, with whom he formed a permanent friendship and working relationship. By 1971 both Miyazaki and Takahata were feeling creatively stifled working within Toei's animation assembly-line production. Miyazaki began producing comic-book stories (manga) on the side, where he had total creative control. Both quit Toei and went to work for other studios during the 1970s. Among their major projects during that decade were several year-long (52 episodes) TV animated serializations of classic children's literature for World Masterpiece Theater. Some of these, including Heidi, Girl of the Alps and Three Thousand Miles in Search of Mother (about a young Italian boy's search for his mother in Argentina), gave Miyazaki the opportunity to visit Europe and South America to sketch art references. A trip to Stockholm for a proposed Pippi Longstocking TV series that was never made gave Miyazaki lots of location and background art that appeared almost twenty years later in his Kiki's Delivery Service.

1979 through 1982 were significant years for Miyazaki at the Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS) studio. He created their major theatrical feature Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, not just directing it but writing its script, designing the characters and drawing the storyboards. In 1981 TMS asked him to produce a children's TV funny-animal series based on the Sherlock Holmes stories, with the characters as dogs (Holmes, the Great Detective, released in America as Sherlock Hound), commissioned by Italy's RAI TV. By this time Miyazaki's connection with Suzuki had been established, and Animage heavily promoted Sherlock Hound as the latest masterwork by Miyazaki. Sherlock Hound was Miyazaki's final TV anime work. The project introduced him to RAI's representative, Marco Pagott, who became a close friend. Both the Italian connection and Pagott (as protagonist Marco Pagotti) appeared in Miyazaki's 1992 Porco Rosso.

Another 1981 TMS project which Miyazaki was asked to join was the theatrical feature Little Nemo. Miyazaki left it very early (TMS did not complete it until 1989), and began his work on Nausicaä for Animage. But his brief involvement with Little Nemo included a business trip to the Disney studio in Hollywood, where he met the young animator John Lasseter — a meeting that would have great significance for Spirited Away twenty years later.

A significant indication of Miyazaki's tunnel vision on the creative aspects of his work is that Studio Ghibli's films for the first five years were critical successes but were only moderately successful at the box office, barely enough to keep the studio open. It was not until 1990 that a literal public demand for Totoro plushies and similar merchandise convinced him that maybe Ghibli should lower itself to (ugh!) merchandising. Not only did the studio almost immediately earn enough from licensing that it could begin plans for expansion, but the flood of Totoro and Kiki toys made the general public more Ghibli-aware than its movie's promotions ever had. Studio Ghibli's 1992's Porco Rosso, 1994's Pom Poko (directed by Isao Takahata), 1997's Princess Mononoke, and 2001's Spirited Away were all Japan's top box-office draws for those years.

Time to Talk
At the Spirited Away press conferences, Miyazaki made it clear that the intellectual and artistic aspects of his projects are still the only ones that really concern him. He and Suzuki had almost a comedy routine, with Suzuki mugging as an exasperated businessman trying to keep an idealistic artist under control.