Hayao Miyazaki explains how he embraces slow cinema
In a 2016 documentary about his work, Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki gave a damning verdict on artificial intelligence and its ability to create animations. “I strongly feel that it is an insult to human life itself,” he said. Miyazaki, as one of the greatest artists of the last 40 years or so, felt that AI will always play second fiddle to the inventiveness of the human soul.
Miyazaki also opened up on the imperative of the human spirit in animation back in 2002 when he was interviewed by Roger Ebert. Discussing the painstakingly dedicated way he and his Studio Ghibli animators go about their work, Miyazaki said, “We take [handmade] cell animation and digitize it in order to enrich the visual look, but everything starts with the human hand drawing.”
He added, “And the colour standard is dictated by the background. We don’t make up a colour on the computer. Without creating those rigid standards, we’ll just be caught up In the whirlpool of computerization.” Evidently, the Ghilbi motive is to avoid being swept up by the ease that computers offer.
Ebert told Miyazaki that he was particularly drawn to the “gratuitous motion” in his films, by which he meant that several characters would often just sit where they are and reflect without necessarily advancing the action or storyline. “We have a word for that in Japanese,” Miyazaki explained. “It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.”
To further elaborate, Miyazaki then clapped his hands three or four times, then said, “The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time, you just get numb.”
He went on to argue that blockbuster Hollywood films are “scared of silence”. “The people who make the movies are scared of silence, so they want to paper and plaster it over,” he said. “They’re worried that the audience will get bored. They might go up and get some popcorn. But just because it’s 80 per cent intense all the time doesn’t mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration.”
Embracing the spirit of slow cinema, Miyazaki suggested that what is really important to cinema-goers is to allow the “underlying emotions” of a film bubble to the surface naturally, without slapping audiences over the head with them.
“What my friends and I have been trying to do since the 1970s is to try and quiet things down a little bit; don’t just bombard them with noise and distraction,” Miyazaki explained. “And to follow the path of children’s emotions and feelings as we make a film. If you stay true to joy and astonishment and empathy, you don’t have to have violence, and you don’t have to have action. They’ll follow you. This is our principle.”
