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10 (More) Years With Hayao Miyazaki
I wrote previously about how private a person auteur director Hayao Miyazaki has traditionally been, and how rare it was when he allowed a young student to start following him around and documenting his process. That article began with tracing Miyazaki’s initial efforts to follow-up the success of Howl’s Moving Castle, and sped along to the successful release of Ponyo four years later, but we only got a taste of some of the difficulties Miyazaki went through in the interim…
The student documenting all this was Kaku Arakawa, who’d gotten lucky with a grant from (popular TV studio) NHK to do a short promotional doc for Studio Ghibli. However, the Studio’s willingness to open up to Arakawa and have him film more seems to have allowed him to go back to NHK and get his short expanded. It could be a case of “right time, right place”, as they were expanding into a remarkable new docu-series they dubbed “Documentary 360”. These are TV episodes that dive behind the scenes and into worlds not often seen or even contemplated by Japanese audiences, like mental health treatment, or the struggle for equal rights in Japan for women and minorities. Many of them are award-winning, online, and accessible to foreign audiences.
Arakawa’s funding by NHK allowed him to turn his short doc into an ongoing series, which became 4 episodes filmed over the better part of 10 years. It…
