If I’m being honest here, I didn’t initially know what approach to take with this post until I thought back to Miyazaki’s own method of creation (to build your thought process around a starting point and to then expand on it – which, after I've written it down, sounds so generic. But I'll expand on it)!

Let me establish a background here to assure you that this will be worth your time: Hayao Miyazaki is the very backbone of the anime industry, who conceptualised and directed 22 feature films in a span of 30 years. This includes Spirited Away, which bagged the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (we’re NOT exploring the inherent bias that the Anime industry faces with respect to what complies to the perspective of a largely Western audience because Disney is essentially a capitalistic endeavour).

Bear with me- it might seem an absurd notion at first, but he has admitted on several occasions to having NO idea what his films were about while in the production stage, which is while working on the frames, the structure, the sub-plots, instead merely exploring the evolution of the characters through what the visual medium, a stroke of his own brush, allowed: “I slowly get to know each character while making the film,” he states –nonchalantly, might I add.

In ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ (only his second film) for example, he set out with the above frame- and the rest of the movie continued to emerge from it. Thus, while innately the movie continues to revolve around the struggles of these characters, the intertwining of the main plot and the character arcs are achieved primarily through on-screen, discernible interactions.

Obviously, this is painstakingly difficult to achieve, not to mention the logical fallacies that are bound to occur on the utilisation of such an approach. Miyazaki, however, believes that “ logical storylines sacrifice creativity” and moreover,“ kids don’t operate on logic” anyway.

Thus, even initially, the goal is to achieve a certain surrealism, find magic in the mundane- the element that Studio Ghibli is infamous for and the reason that Miyazaki’s name is considered almost synonymous to the establishment.