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Throughout January, FilmFour is screening a season of films by the masters of animation at Studio Ghibli. Daniel Etherington traces the story of the company behind the Oscar-winning Spirited Away
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In 1971, Miyazaki and Takahata left Toei, and, moving through companies A-Pro and Zuiyo, continued to hone their skills and gather collaborators, men like Yoshifumi Kondo. Takahata produced versions of classic Western tales such as 'Heidi' and 'Anne Of Green Gables', and Miyazaki got his first directing gigs on TV before he landed a feature, 1979's madcap adventure The Castle Of Cagliostro.
Miyazaki also worked in manga: his ongoing project was the tale of a young girl called Nausicaä, a heroine in a post-apocalyptic future. This was published in the magazine 'Animage', under the editorship of Toshio Suzuki, who would eventually become one of the core Ghibli producers. The publishers of 'Animage', Tokuma Shoten, decided to back an anime adaptation, which was released in 1984. It was sufficiently successful to found an animation studio. That studio was Ghibli, named after an Italian 1930s plane, itself named after a desert wind. (Miyazaki's family had a plane parts business).
During 1984, Miyazaki visited Britain and spent time in the Rhonda among the striking miners. His experiences would influence the first Ghibli feature, 1986's Castle In The Sky. Where Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind had featured an exotic, terrible future, Castle took place in an early industrial society where nature and technology coexisted and legends were told of a lost, airborne civilisation. Despite Miyazaki playing down his politics in later years, his films, and those of Takahata, frequently deal with the relationship between man and nature, often realised with reference to the folklore and beliefs of Japan, where spirits abound.
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