The apathetic girl who inspired the protagonist in Spirited Away has grown into "a decent, strong adult."

HM: I know a girl who is like the girl who is in this film and now she has become a strong woman. I don't think it's because of the film… but she turned into a decent, strong adult. I seem to model my characters on people who are around me that I know. And a friend who's the model for the father, who eats so much that he turns into a pig, is actually here with me today.

JL: In many of your films, you show a great concern with ecology and the human impact on the environment… has this been a growing concern throughout your career?

HM: It's not that nature or ecology has become a growing concern for me. I think it's just part of our natural surrounding and it's sort of a common thing to depict it. For example, I tell my artists and the team working together to make it smoggier. Then it looks more like the natural surroundings that we live in. It's not that I like smog. So it's the kind of landscape that our children and we are used to living in and whether we should do something about it or not is something that we should think about in real life rather than depicting it in a particular way in the stories on screen.

JL: You mentioned that one of the inspirations that you have for your films goes back to fairy tales…

HM: When I work on a new story, I think I'm writing a new story, but when I scrape things away to its core, I realize that there are fragments of these old folk tales or legends that form my stories. It's not that I'm trying to resurrect an old legend, but naturally it's there at the core. I think it shows that I'm in the flow of human civilization.

JL: Is My Neighbor Totoro inspired by a folk tale [because of the magical creatures that only children can see]?

HM: Rather than trying to depict the magical creatures, my intention in making My Neighbor Totoro was to show my appreciation and love of nature, which I had pretty much ignored up until that time. I had a couple of fragments: somebody that's waiting at the bus stop and a strange creature standing right next to that person. And a small child who sees a partially transparent little creature. And those two fragments were in my mind for about 10 years. So the child at the bus stop needs to be an older child because a really young child would not be waiting for a parent to come home. And so the child that needs to see transparent creatures needs to be a young child, so for a long time I wondered how to connect those fragments. Finally, I came upon the idea of making them sisters. And then the story started evolving.

JL: In your films even your villains are so appealing. Could you talk about, as you're creating a villain, what you're thinking?

HM: When I start creating a villain, I start liking the villain and so the villain is not really evil. The Fleischer brothers made Superman, and they have a scene where there's a steel making iron works right behind the Hollywood Hills. A bad guy -- the evil character -- who puts so much into creating such a factory and investing so much is somebody that should be lovable. And villains actually work harder than the heroes.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.