Hayao Miyazaki (born 1941) is a Japanese animation filmmaker, animator, and manga artist from Tokyo. He joined Toei Animation in 1963 and, after working on numerous television and theatrical productions, co-founded Studio Ghibli with Isao Takahata and others in 1985. His representative manga, “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” is set in a polluted world long after the collapse of industrial civilization. It follows the young princess Nausicaä as she confronts warfare among rival states and investigates the ecosystem known as the Sea of Corruption. Expanding far beyond the story of its film adaptation, the manga examines attempts to control nature, forms of life engineered by earlier civilizations, and whether a damaged human society should be preserved at any cost. It received the Japan Cartoonists Association Award Grand Prize and the Seiun Award for Best Comic, while Miyazaki’s films “Spirited Away” and “The Boy and the Heron” won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
