Miyazaki Linkdump
I'm looking forward to seeing Howl's Moving Castle more than any other movie this year, and will, I hope, get down to Boston within the next week or two to do so, but until then, here are some links about the great Hayao Miyazaki:
- Nausicaa.net: The Miyazaki Web: A great place to start, and a phenomenal resource.
- Part 1 and Part 2 of James Schellenberg's overview of Miyazaki's films for Strange Horizons (with Part 3 still to come)
- Cynthia Ward's 2003 overview of Miyazaki for Locus Online
- Wikipedia's Miyazaki entry
- The Internet Movie Database's Miyazaki page
- A March 2003 Metafilter post about Miyazaki, with lots of links
- Anime News Network's Miyazaki page
- A January 2002 interview with Miyazaki at Midnight Eye
- Cindy Lynn Speer's overview of Neil Gaiman's film work includes some information about Neil's work on the English dub of Princess Mononoke
- An interview with Neil Gaiman about Miyazaki at The Critical Eye
- Steve Alpert, director of Studio Ghibli's Overseas Business Division, chronicles the process that Princess Mononoke went through in getting from Japan to the U.S.
- A 1998 essay for Film Comment about Miyazaki by David Chute
- A July 2003 article for Salon by Laura Miller about Spirited Away, which I just watched again this weekend. If you have it on DVD and aren't fluent in Japanese, be sure to compare the dubbed ending to the subtitled ending (it's worth doing with Castle in the Sky, too).
- An interview with Margaret Talbot, who wrote a profile of Miyazak for The New Yorker (alas, the profile's not online -- I read it shortly after it came out, and it's worth searching for at a library, particularly for the descriptions of the Ghibli Museum)
- A December 2003 profile of Studio Ghibli for Japan, Inc.
- At Amazon.com: a guide to the Nausicaa manga
- The Museum of Modern Art in NY this month has an exhibit devoted to Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, "Masters of Animation"
- An article describes an exhibition in Paris comparing Miyazaki and Moebius
- Reviews of Howl: Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes.
- And, lest we forget, Howl was inspired by the book by Diana Wynne Jones. Greer Gilman says the film is "more of a fantasia on the book than a recreation. It's much darker and more dreamlike, less madly logical: as if Miyazaki had fallen asleep with his head on the book and dreamed it." I found the book grew tedious after the first few chapters, so I expect to be glad for the changes, though I'm sure there will be purists who are offended. (Aren't there always purists who are offended? It's their prime directive.)