The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

(animationobsessive.substack.com)

188 points | by vinhnx 2 days ago

9 comments

  • msuniverse2026 13 hours ago
    He used to make a lot of short illustrated stories too. My favourite is 'Imouto He' because I love the plane concept - there is really nothing like it and I wonder if an aerospace engineer could look at it and spot any reasons it couldn't exist.

    https://ghiblicon.blogspot.com/2008/03/imoto-he-for-my-siste...

    • seabass-labrax 12 hours ago
      Not an aerospace engineer, but I think it looks borderline plausible and simultaneously very unsafe.

      Having the propeller so high up relative to the center of mass is going to produce a massive pitch down moment: because there's only a small horizontal stabilizer, it would require very aggressive thrust vectoring or elevon usage. A fly-by-wire control system would be essential, I think.

      The anhedral wing angle would make it even more unstable, and there is really no reason for it here except aesthetics. Seaplanes with wing-mounted propellers could benefit from the extra clearance, but the propeller is not even on the wing here.

      See the 737 MAX for how this kind of pitch instability can go very wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

    • nsyne 11 hours ago
      Slightly related, someone did make the glider from Nausicaa!

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSky_M-02

  • ostacke 13 hours ago
    Seeing Miyazaki’s Pippi makes me so sad that we never got to see that movie. I’ve been reading a ton of Astrid Lindgren with my kid lately, and for many of them I see them in my mind’s eye as Myazaki films, and especially Pippi. Myazaki and Lindgren have a lot in common, I think, in how they tell stories from children’s perspectives. What we’ve got for Pippi movie adaptations instead are very poor things.
  • tralarpa 15 hours ago
    I highly recommend the NHK documentary "10 years with Hayao Miyazaki" that shows how he works (and also his sometimes difficult character).
    • Maken 13 hours ago
      That documentary is a must-watch for any Miyazaki fan. They recorded the entire creation of Ponyo, from Miyazaki's watercolors to the final released movie.

      It also shows why the movie ends as abruptly as it does and why Ghibli was eventually disbanded. With Takahata gone everything was bottlenecked by Miyazaki's himself, and he was simultaneously crumbling under the pressure and refusing to let anyone else have creative input in the studio.

    • Marcan 6 hours ago
      For those interested, the documentary can be found in the video section of the Internet Archive.
  • mjhay 15 hours ago
    There’s so much magic, for lack of a better word, in those illustrations. Miyazaki is really one of a kind.
  • Shogo_Kaneda 2 days ago
    Thank you for sharing the image boards! They're very rare and impressed me. How have you found them?
    • vinhnx 12 hours ago
      You're welcome! I shared from AnimationObsessive's blog, and they did a great deal of research and showed the drawing image boards on paper from Mr. Hayao Miyazaki himself and the studio. This article I find unique, and some images have not been seen or public before. I recommend subscribing to their blog for more animation articles.
    • mdurana 16 hours ago
      There's always a "courtesy of..." under each image board and it seems like it's all books released for each film.
      • caycep 15 hours ago
        also, the inaugural special exhibition for the new Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences museum in LA was on Miyazaki; they somehow gathered all these boards and notebooks in one place for several months. This was magical, and I give the curators props for doing this; they could have easily started off with a self-celebratory American/Hollywood franchise...

        But I think they released a exhibition book to go along with this that has a lot of his artwork in there as well

  • ge96 16 hours ago
    > Future Boy Conan

    That's what that giant flying wing warship is from

  • krapp 1 hour ago
    And nowadays people believe that just setting a Ghibli filter on an AI image generator makes them Miyazaki's equal, because talent isn't real.
  • dartharva 8 hours ago
    What the hell, many of these look like complete frames in themselves! Crazy
  • zhao_ 9 hours ago
    [dead]