Watching Miyazaki Say Goodbye
The characters still move through my dreams. Melodies from Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away surface when I’m not paying attention, attached to nothing in particular. I’ve spent years inside Miyazaki’s worlds without ever being fully able to account for how much room they take up.
Anyone who doesn’t feel this—I genuinely pity them. Their lives are colder and I can’t fix that.
Japanese director Mami Sunada spent a year embedded inside Studio Ghibli with her camera, following the daily workings of the small, obsessive machine that formed the fantasies of entire generations. She was present when Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement. The resulting documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, gives faces to the people behind the drawings—the exhausted, brilliant, quietly frantic humans producing something that always looks effortless from the outside.
What Sunada captures is the specific texture of a place held together by belief. The studio’s daily rhythms, Miyazaki’s contradictions, the accumulated weight of building something designed to outlast everyone involved in building it. No hagiography—just a man at a desk, drawing, occasionally difficult, irreplaceable and apparently aware of it.
Hayao—please don’t go. He went anyway. The work stays.