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    Joaquina Kalukango and Amanda Williams on Creative Freedom

    The “Slave Play” actress and the Chicago-based artist discuss generational gaps, success and the art that brought them each acclaim.What does it mean for an artist to be free? And what does that freedom look like for a contemporary Black artist? Amanda Williams has recently been asking herself these very questions. A Chicago-based visual artist who trained as an architect, Williams, 47, is known for her pieces exploring the nuances of color, both racial and aesthetic. Her breakout work was “Color(ed) Theory,” a 2014-16 series in which she painted eight condemned houses on Chicago’s South Side in vivid, culturally coded shades, such as “Ultrasheen,” a dark turquoise that matches the hue of a Black hair-care product, and “Crown Royal Bag,” a purplish pigment that mirrors the packaging of a popular whisky.In a 2018 TED Talk, Williams discussed how we perceive color — specifically, how our perceptions are determined by context. One example, she said, was redlining — federal housing maps from the 1930s marked neighborhoods inhabited by Black Chicagoans as red, contributing to policies that prevented many residents from securing loans — which weaponized color and resulted in underinvestment. When the actress Joaquina Kalukango, 32, heard the speech, she was awe-struck. Kalukango is no stranger to powerful works of art: Last year, she received a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a play for her work in Jeremy O. Harris’s searing, passionately debated drama “Slave Play,” which is set on a plantation and follows a trio of modern-day interracial couples whose relationships are stymied by conflicting views on race.One rainy morning in October, Kalukango met Williams at the latter’s studio in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Kalukango was days away from starting a Chicago run of “Paradise Square,” a musical about the 1863 Manhattan draft riots, in which Irish immigrants turned on the Black neighbors with whom they’d previously peacefully coexisted. (It’s headed to Broadway early next year.) Meanwhile, Williams is expanding on “What Black Is This, You Say?,” an ongoing, multiplatform series of abstract paintings inspired by cultural touchstones and observations related to the Black experience that she showed at Art Basel in Miami Beach this month.Amid laughter, Williams and Kalukango talked generational differences, the desire to be “regular” and the blurry line between artistic genius and madness.AMANDA WILLIAMS: Twenty twenty was a mess. I was contemplating Kool-Aid [the subject of one of her latest paintings] and laughing about it, and then the whole world was like, “How are you feeling about being Black, segregation and systemic racism?” People were like, “I want to help, right this minute.” I thought, “I don’t know how I feel right now. I was actually doing something else, and now I’m going to cry.” It’s a little easier now. We’re farther away from it. How did that feel for you?JOAQUINA KALUKANGO: It’s interesting, because “Slave Play” opened [on Broadway in October 2019] before the country had its racial awakening. There was a lot of aggression toward our production. There was a lot of pushback, specifically within the Black community. [Some who had seen the play, and many others who hadn’t, found it offensive in its use of antebellum role play and inappropriately sexually graphic; one online petition calling for the show’s shutdown referred to it as “anti-Black sentiment disguised as art.”] But after audiences saw the show, there was so much conversation. On the streets, people would come up to me and talk about it. That was affirming. It was also exhausting. The greatest thing that helped me was when we had a “Black Out” night — the audience was all Black. I heard the show in a different way: It was funny. There was this release of Black people finally being able to feel like this show was for them, as opposed to sitting next to someone and wondering, “Why are you laughing at this?” How can we get Black people to feel free regardless of who’s sitting next to them? How can we fully enjoy ourselves in situations and experience art without feeling like other people are watching us? It’s always a struggle.Kalukango in “Slave Play” at the Golden Theater in New York City, in September 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA.W.: I’ve thought a lot about the freedom question. Take Kanye West. He’s obviously experiencing some mental health issues. But also, he has a level of mastery and talent that borders on complete freedom. He says inappropriate things, and maybe he doesn’t even understand what freedom is. But if you’ve ascended beyond practically any other brown human you’ve ever met, and you can buy Wyoming, isn’t that free? [West has purchased two huge ranches there.] He just does what he wants. [For the listening party for “Donda,” his recent album named after his mother, who died in 2007,] Kanye was like, “I’m going to recreate my mom’s house in [the Chicago Bears stadium] Soldier Field.” Everybody was confused. But I thought, “This could be a mental moment, but it’s also pure creativity.” Every artist who you might say is the most free, in terms of pushing their craft to the edge, is always called crazy.J.K.: Did anyone tell you, early in your career, that you had to work within certain boundaries? Did you feel pressure to be a certain type of artist?A.W.: I trained as an architect [at Cornell University]. My parents were in a panic that I might be an artist. They were like, “Artists who make money are called architects.” In a sense, that was a boundary. Then, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area right at the height of the dot-com boom. The economy was great. Projects were bountiful; jobs were plentiful. I was able to live out this architectural career that I thought would take 30 years in five or six. Then I had a boss who said, “If you could be doing anything in the world right now, what would it be?” She thought I was going to say, “Taking over your company.” And I said, “Painting.” She encouraged me to try it. And the Bay Area lent itself to that. Everybody had an idea. Google was born when I lived in the Bay. That kind of environment helped me take the leap.If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t. I’d be like, “What if it doesn’t work? How am I going to eat?” But back then, I was just like, “Oh, I’ll eat some avocados, it’s California.” There’s no moment I remember when somebody said I couldn’t do it. Well, I’m sure there was, but I blocked it out. My friend and I were just talking about how our generation tended to dismiss racist comments or sexual advances. We just kept moving. Your generation does not tolerate nonsense. Is that how it feels?J.K.: Definitely. The new show I’m in, “Paradise Square,” is a musical that has been in development for a long time. There was always a struggle to figure out whose lens the story should be told through. Now, it finally centers around this free Black woman in New York who owned a bar in 1863 [Nelly Freeman, the role Kalukango is playing]. We have an E.D.I. [equity, diversity and inclusion] person who talks about terminology. One day in rehearsal, an assistant said, “Joaquina, we’re not going to say the L-word in this sentence.” I was like, “ ‘Let’? ‘Listen’? ”A.W.: Which “L”?J.K.: It was “lynch.” I said, “What? We’re just not going to say this?” But the idea was, we don’t have to say that word until it’s absolutely necessary. I thought, “Well, this is a whole new way of being, even for me. That word doesn’t bother my spirit, but it’s bothering other people’s spirits.” It’s a different world from when I was growing up in Atlanta.Loren ToneyA.W.: How does that impact your craft? Does it trip you up to have to be mindful of words in a way that maybe you hadn’t been before?J.K.: We’re all more careful. Everyone’s fragile. We’re still in the midst of a pandemic, and so many issues have come up for so many people. We’re all giving each other a lot of care and grace in this new era that we’re trying to build, this new era of theater we’re trying to make. But it’s a bit of a struggle, I’ll be honest. When you do work that’s specifically about a very troublesome time — and if you look at the Jan. 6 riot [at the U.S. Capitol], it’s similar to the draft riots — you can’t sugarcoat it. You can’t run away from it. It’s always a balance of, how do you tell a story without traumatizing our community?T: When did you first encounter each other’s work?J.K.: I first saw Amanda’s work in her TED Talk.A.W.: Oh my God. I had wondered, how did you find out about me? How do you know who I am?J.K.: I had such a visceral reaction to “Color(ed) Theory.” All of it was so much a part of my life, my childhood. Plus, I just love colors. How did you get that concept? What inspired you?A.W.: I grew up on Chicago’s South Side and crossed town every day to go to school. Chicago segregation, coupled with the city’s grid, is perfect for systemic oppression because it sets boundaries, and then we mentally reinforce them. I was hyperaware of color all the time, as in race, thinking, “That’s a Mexican neighborhood.” “Chinese people are there.” “White folks do this.” Things like that. And I’ve loved [chromatic] color since birth. Then I learned about color in an academic setting.One summer, while [I was] teaching color theory, a friend joked, “They pay you money to teach people what? Red and blue is green?” I said, “No, color theory is a whole science.” She said, “You know colored theory.” We laughed and I left it alone. A week or two later, I thought, “I do know colored theory.” I spent another few years making sense of it. It seemed so juicy. I started to think, “What things make you think of the color first?” There’s a story I told in the TED Talk: I met a gentleman who grew up near the “Crown Royal Bag” house. He thought the purple house meant Prince was coming. Even after I told him about my art, he said, “You wait and see. Prince might show up and perform right here.” Suddenly, he had hope for that vacant lot, in a way that maybe he didn’t before. To me, that was success.J.K.: It was brilliant.A.W.: At first, I wasn’t as familiar with your work, but when I started to look into it, I was like, “How could I have missed all of this? These are the exact same things I’m thinking and talking about.” I’m excited about how we translate these thoughts across mediums — theater, performance, music, architecture, sculpture, writing.Williams’s “Color(ed) Theory: Pink Oil Moisturizer” (2014-16).Amanda WilliamsWilliams’s “Color(ed) Theory: Crown Royal Bag” (2014-16).Amanda WilliamsT: You both have long been working artists, but your breakout pieces — “Slave Play” and “Color(ed) Theory” — made you famous. Has that affected your work? Do you feel an added responsibility now?J.K.: An actor starts off auditioning for nearly everything. We’re told “no” 99 out of 100 times. Initially, the roles I took were just what ended up coming to me. But I also believe that what’s for you is for you. When you’re on a path that you’re aligned with, more things start coming your way. Now I am adamant that Black women see many facets of ourselves, that we are depicted with a wide gamut of emotions: the unflattering and unraveling parts but also joyful and loving, peaceful and gentle. I want it all for us, at every possible moment. I’m trying to ensure I show Black women as full human beings — not stereotypes, not archetypes. We’re not strong all the time. Yes, our ancestors had to survive, but there was always joy in the midst of all that pain.A.W.: You also have to give yourself permission to be an artist. That’s hard because there is a burden. You know how few people have the same opportunities, so you always want to make sure you’ve done justice. At the same time, you have to take the pressure off. Our society thinks about the home run, the slam dunk — the idea that each thing you do must be better than the last. But if you look at any creative being’s full oeuvre, there are ups and downs. Artists have to continue to understand themselves and improve their craft for themselves. It makes me think of this great artist Raymond Saunders, who lives in the Bay Area. He taught an advanced painting class, and I was teaching at the same school, so he invited me to his class. I went — and the students were eating handmade pastries from this beautiful boutique in Berkeley or something. I’m like, “What is this?” And they’re like, “He told us he can’t teach us how to paint, he can teach us how to live.” It was mind-blowing. Maybe we don’t have to nail it every single week of every year. Maybe we just nail it every five years. Maybe we can sleep one of those years.J.K.: I always think, “Do we ever have the space to be mediocre and figure things out?” I don’t want to be Black girl magic every day. Sometimes I want to be regular. Just regular Black. [All laugh]A.W.: Regular Black. I’m going to make a painting based on that.T: How do you two define success right now?A.W.: Just being the best me. I don’t worry so much if my work is well received or if it garners accolades. That sounds so cheesy. My husband jokes, “Well, that’s nice to say after you’ve gotten the accolades.” [All laugh]J.K.: I love originating and creating new roles. For me, success is knowing that there are girls coming up who can use work I’ve done as audition pieces for colleges. In “Slave Play,” my character, Kaneisha, has a 10- or 15-minute monologue. She takes up space for almost the entire last act. I’d never seen anything like it onstage before. For a long time, it was hard to find material or scene work that included multiple Black characters. It was hard finding those plays [when I studied at the Juilliard School]. It’s all about the next generation for me. If at any point I can make someone feel more free, more confident in their abilities, that’s the win.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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    Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell

    Hayao Miyazaki photographed outside his atelier near Studio Ghibli in Tokyo on Oct. 4, 2021.Takahiro KaneyamaHayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last SpellNo artist has explored the contradictions of humanity as sympathetically and critically as the Japanese animation legend. Now, at 80, he’s coming out of retirement with another movie.Nov. 23, 2021THE SCREEN IS black, and then comes the first frame: Hayao Miyazaki, the greatest animated filmmaker since the advent of the form in the early 20th century and one of the greatest filmmakers of any genre, is seated in front of a cast-iron stove with a pipe running up toward the ceiling, flanked by windows propped half open. Sun burns through the branches of the trees outside. Three little apples perch on a red brick ledge behind the stove. He wears an off-white apron whose narrow strap hooks around the neck and attaches with a single button on the left side — the same style of apron he has worn for years as a work and public uniform, a reminder that he is at once artist and artisan, ever on guard against daubs of paint — over a crisp white collared shirt, his white mustache and beard neat and trim, and his white hair blurring into a near halo as he gazes calmly at me through owlish black glasses, across the 6,700 miles from Tokyo to New York.I have one hour to ask questions. It is a rare gift, as Miyazaki has long preferred not to speak to the press except when absolutely necessary (which is to say, when he’s prodded into promoting a film), and has not granted an interview to an English-language outlet since 2014. Our conversation has been brokered by the newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which mounted the first North American retrospective of his work in September, with Studio Ghibli’s cautious assent; Jessica Niebel, an exhibitions curator, cites him as an exemplar of an auteur who “has managed to stay true to himself” while making movies that are “approachable to people everywhere.” I know I am lucky to have this time, and yet it feels wrong to meet Miyazaki this way, at a distance (due to Covid-19 travel restrictions) and through a computer, a machine he has so famously shunned.To accompany T’s story on Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli provided rarely seen watercolor imageboards drawn by the animator himself during the development of his films. Here, a sketch of the warrior Ashitaka from “Princess Mononoke” (1997).Hayao Miyazaki © 1997 Studio Ghibli – NDFor, in an age of ever-advancing technology, his animated films are radical in their repudiation of it. From “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), with its vision of gentle friendship between two children and an enormous growling forest creature whom only they can see, to the ecological epic “Princess Mononoke” (1997), whose title character, a human raised by wolves, first appears sucking blood out of a wound in her wolf mother’s side (the hero, an exiled prince, takes one look at her blood-smeared face and falls in love), to the phantasmagorical fable “Spirited Away” (2001), in which a timid girl must learn pluck and save her foolish parents (who’ve been transformed into pigs) by working at a bathhouse that caters to a raucous array of gods, Miyazaki renders the wildest reaches of imagination and the maddest swirls of motion — the stormy waves that turn into eel-like pursuers in “Ponyo” (2008), the houses rippling and bucking with the force of an earthquake in “The Wind Rises” (2013) — almost entirely by hand. And unlike Walt Disney, the only figure of comparable stature in animation, Miyazaki, who is now 80, has never retreated to the role of a corporate impresario, dictating from on high: At Studio Ghibli, the animation company he founded with the filmmaker Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki in 1985, he’s always worked in the trenches, as part of a team of around a hundred employees devoted just to production, including key animators and background, cleanup and in-between artists, whose desks he used to make the rounds of daily for decades. (His own desk is hardly bigger than theirs.) He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself. Only occasionally has he resorted to computer-generated imagery, and in some films not at all.“I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil,” he tells me. (We speak through an interpreter, Yuriko Banno.) Japanese pencils are particularly good, he notes: The graphite is delicate and responsive — in the 2013 documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness,” directed by Mami Sunada, he mocks himself for having to rely on a soft 5B or even softer 6B as he gets older — and encased in sugi (Japanese cedar), although, he muses, “I don’t see that many quality wood trees left in Japan anymore.” He adds, “That’s a true story,” then laughs, leaning in to the screen, and I think of the ancient, moss-cloaked trees in “Princess Mononoke,” cut down to fuel Lady Eboshi’s ironworks, and of their counterparts in the Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine on the island of Yakushima in the south, which Miyazaki visited while location scouting for the film. The oldest cedar there, 83 feet tall and nearly 54 feet in circumference, is believed to be more than 2,600 years old, making it one of the oldest trees on earth. (The forest of the film does not exactly correspond to the ravine, Miyazaki has said: “Rather, it is a depiction of the forest that has existed within the hearts of Japanese from ancient times.”)A watercolor imageboard from Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” (1997).Hayao Miyazaki © 1997 Studio Ghibli – NDMiyazaki lives with his wife, Akemi, a former fellow animator — they met as colleagues at Toei Animation nearly 60 years ago on the movie “Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon,” and married in 1965; she stopped working to raise their two sons, at his request, and, he has said in the past, “hasn’t forgiven” him — in Tokorozawa, northwest of Tokyo, where the Totoro Fund (supported in part by donations from the Miyazakis) has purchased more than 10 wooded hectares, dense with oak and camphor trees, for conservation. But today he is speaking to me from the Tokyo suburb of Koganei, from a small building a short walk away from the headquarters of Studio Ghibli that he uses as a private atelier. He sometimes affectionately calls it Buta-ya, Japanese for “pig house.” (He is fond of pigs, and often sketches himself as one.) Out front he parks his cloud-gray Citroën 2CV, with a tiny two-horsepower engine and a rollback roof that leaks when it rains (the model was discontinued in 1990); a wine-colored version of it appears in the careening cliffside chase scene in his directorial debut, “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro” (1979). Every December, he puts cuddly stuffed goats, mementos of his work on the “Heidi: A Girl of the Alps” TV series in the ’70s, in the kitchen window to greet passing children. When the Academy Museum requested a goat to display in its exhibition, he demurred: The children would miss them.Buta-ya was meant to be a retirement office, where Miyazaki could pursue personal projects. He built it in 1998, after announcing that he would make no more feature films, then returned to Studio Ghibli the next year with the story idea that would become “Spirited Away,” the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history until last fall’s “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” (an extension of a popular manga franchise and part of a different strain of Japanese anime, focused on action and vengeance, with a video-game-like feel). “Spirited Away” won the 2002 Academy Award for best animated feature, the only film from outside the West to ever do so. In 2013, he said again that he was done with film, and that time, having directed 11 features in 34 years, he was taken seriously: Studio Ghibli shut down its production department.Yet here he is now, making a new film. “Because I wanted to,” he says, and grins, like a grizzled thief come back for one last heist.GORGEOUS, PROFOUND, BORDERLESS in possibility — yes, yes, but above all, Miyazaki’s films are thrilling. He is a master of suspense, whether sending a fugitive girl skittering down a rickety pipe that pops off the wall as she runs (“Spirited Away”), or swooping after a novice witch reeling on a broomstick because she’s forgotten how to fly and must quickly relearn so she can rescue her friend, a boy who’s dangling from a dirigible and about to crash into a clock tower (the 1989 “Kiki’s Delivery Service”). His visual style is at once commanding and intimate, a mix of fluid, loose lines and an accumulation of detail — in contrast to more mainstream anime’s labor-saving preference for caricature and clipped movement — that enables him to invoke the immediacy of life without being beholden to its precise contours. He deploys a palette of saturated colors, bright but never gaudy, standing out against cool grays and dun tones, and pays attention to quicksilver adjustments of light and shade, especially the shadows within shadows that give featheriness and depth to the night. He is equally expressive in close-up and panorama, and virtuosic in his open skies, creating clouds that are almost characters unto themselves, whether high-heaped loomers, broad swaths of rubble or voluptuous whorls like the heavy heads of flowers, stained by sunset or the deepening blues of day. (The Academy Museum’s retrospective includes a green-carpeted knoll where visitors may rest and gaze up at a video of passing clouds.)A self-portrait in marker made exclusively for T by Miyazaki on shikishi board, upon which it’s customary in Japan to draw or write a message in order to express gratitude (the characters below the drawing are his signature).Hayao MiyazakiAnd how easily Miyazaki slips from one register to the next, from hushed to clamorous, often in the same scene, as in the exquisitely timed comedy of towering Totoro, with his giant claws, standing beside two little girls at a bus stop in the dark. It’s raining; one girl offers him an umbrella, an instrument he has never encountered before. A toad stares at him from across the road, as if equally perplexed. We squint up at the trees to see a few particularly fat raindrops falling from a branch. They plonk down on the umbrella, loud, and Totoro startles. More drops come, a scattering of drumbeats, and his eyes widen. He heaves his body up in the air and lands with a boom, and all the drops caught in the trees come crashing down, his own personal storm. And then — because of course there’s more — the bus arrives, only it’s a scampering cat with headlight eyes and a door that opens in its side to whisk Totoro away.But Miyazaki is a realist, too. Toward the end of his 2004 film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which is mostly devoted to magic — a girl is transformed by a witch into an elderly woman, a wizard shape-shifts into a dark man-bird, a castle uproots itself and clanks around on clawed feet — a great-bellied airship looms into view and starts dropping bombs on a cobblestone town. Black clouds and flames surge over houses; the sky hangs red. No war takes place in the source material, a 1986 novel by the British writer Diana Wynne Jones. This is Miyazaki’s memory.He was born in 1941, the same year that Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, and he was 4 years old when American planes attacked the city of Utsunomiya, where his family had been evacuated from Tokyo. He recounts in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” how he saw a glow at the window and hid under a bridge, his legs in a ditch. With the incendiaries still falling, his father carried him up the riverbank and to a small truck so they could escape. As Miyazaki and his father settled into the vehicle’s bed, a woman with a child asked if they could come, too, but they were left behind. “We left them behind,” Miyazaki says. A month later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. More humiliations followed: the emperor’s renunciation of divinity, the dismantlement of the country’s armed forces and a formal abjuring of war, enshrined in the Constitution.A still from “Castle in the Sky” (1986).Hayao Miyazaki © 1986 Studio GhibliA still from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).Hayao Miyazaki © 1988 Studio GhibliAlthough Miyazaki was too young to comprehend the magnitude of what was taking place, that time remains a cornerstone of his work, as it was and has been for many Japanese artists who came of age during the war or in its aftermath. The late antiwar painter Tatsuo Ikeda, who was born in 1928 and conscripted as a teenager to become a kamikaze pilot — the country’s defeat saved him — started out making portraits for American soldiers from snapshots of their girlfriends or wives, and went on to create eerie black-and-white tableaus that bristle with malformed animals and punishing machines. Haruki Murakami, born in 1949 in Kyoto, the former seat of the imperial court, writes novels of deadpan humor that surreally interrogate the legacy and persistence of Japanese nationalism.And perhaps the most harrowing Japanese war film ever made is Studio Ghibli’s 1988 “Grave of the Fireflies,” adapted by Takahata from a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosaka about two children left homeless in the wake of an air raid. It bears the freight of Takahata’s own memories of fleeing a firebombing as a 9-year-old — he was born in 1935 — as his feet were burned by melting asphalt, and wandering without food for two days. “No one gave him anything, not even potato vines,” Miyazaki recalls in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.” (Astonishingly, in its first release, “Grave of the Fireflies” was paired with “My Neighbor Totoro” as a double bill: anguish and solace.)Arguably, the rise of Japanese animation itself, in both its monster/superhero and more lyrical veins, was a direct response to the shock of defeat and anxiety over atomic fallout and the threat of genetic mutations. The monster Godzilla first appeared in a live-action 1954 film as a dinosaur, roused from the bottom of the ocean by an American hydrogen bomb test, who spews radiation over Tokyo in a visceral re-enactment of an air raid. (Miyazaki tells me that he remembers watching the movie and being reminded of American warplanes “dropping bombs from high above, out of reach.”) If Godzilla was fear and rage incarnate, Astro Boy — known in Japanese as the Mighty Atom, and introduced by the animation pioneer Osamu Tezuka in a 1951 manga, followed by an animated TV series starting in 1963 — sublimated anxiety into heroism: A boy robot whose body is powered by nuclear energy gets abandoned by his maker (giving him kinship with the war’s many orphans), but learns to use his abilities to fight for peace.Miyazaki’s movies, with their warplanes and intrusions of Western décor and dress, keep circling back to the traumatic moment when Japan, which until the mid-19th century had kept itself closed off to the outside world, was forced to embrace the West and Western values. The devastated population complied in confused haste, as if to erase the shame of recent history and their own complicity in a war waged by a nationalist government out of a belief in Japan’s cultural superiority. (Some saw this as a capitulation to the West and a fatal loss of dignity; in 1970, the writer Yukio Mishima died by ritual suicide in protest, after shouting, “Long live the emperor!”) Niebel, of the Academy Museum, suggests that Japanese audiences are drawn to Miyazaki’s work because it’s essentially nostalgic. There’s a yearning, faintly mournful, for an older Japan, one free of both imperialistic hubris and Western materialism.A woven wool blanket — featuring Chihiro, the heroine of “Spirited Away” (2001) — designed by Loewe’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, as part of a series in which T commissioned four artists deeply influenced by Studio Ghibli to create original works that accompany this story. “Their poetic films have the ability to connect with adults just as powerfully as with children, creating a sense of nostalgia,” Anderson says. “Loewe’s connection to the studio is in our mutual love of crafts and artisanal techniques, expressed in our respective languages.”Photo by Florent TanetBut part of his films’ greatness is that they can also be loved by viewers who never sense the dark current below. In “Porco Rosso” (1992), the hero may be an embittered war veteran, but he’s also, literally and delightfully, a pig flying a plane, and is spectacularly good at it.MIYAZAKI’S FATHER WAS not a bystander in the war. He ran a munitions factory that produced wings for the military’s fearsomely acrobatic Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter planes, which in the last months of the war were converted for kamikaze missions. In a 1995 newspaper essay in The Asahi Shimbun, Miyazaki describes his father as something of a grifter, bribing officials to accept defective parts. After Japan’s surrender, when there were no more planes to furnish, his father used leftover duralumin, an aluminum alloy that had helped keep the Zero lightweight and dangerous, to make flimsy spoons, which he pawned off on impoverished customers desperate for household goods. Later, he briefly turned the factory into a dance hall, before bringing the family — Miyazaki is the second of four sons — back to Tokyo.Although Miyazaki never set foot in his father’s factory, which was off limits as a military site, he was entranced by airplanes and the liberation of flight from an early age. (Ghibli is both the hot, dusty wind that sweeps through the Libyan Desert and the name of an airplane, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli, a World War II Italian reconnaissance bomber.) This obsession has manifested in almost every film, in humans who turn into flying creatures or simply walk on air; in fanciful machines like the flaptors in “Castle in the Sky” (1986), propelled by four translucent wings; and in reproductions of real-world aircraft, as in “Porco Rosso,” in which the hero’s wrecked seaplane, inspired by the 1920s-era Italian racer Macchi M.33, is rebuilt by an all-female crew to ready it for a climactic dogfight, and in “The Wind Rises,” which tells the (not entirely) true story of the designer of the Zero, Jiro Horikoshi, who in the film as in life opposed the war and whom Miyazaki portrays as reluctant to see the beautiful machines he’s created deployed as emissaries of death — a stand-in for Miyazaki’s father, or the man he might have been.As Miyazaki grew older, he found fault with his father both for profiting off the war and for never expressing any shame or guilt. (He shares this troubled inheritance with the writers W.G. Sebald, born in 1944 in the Bavarian Alps, who had to grapple with his father’s past as a soldier in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and the Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, born in the suburbs of Paris in 1945 not long after V-E Day, whose own father kept company with collaborators and profiteers.) And yet, Miyazaki wrote in 1995, “I am like him” — a man of contradictions: a filmmaker who condemns the proliferation of images even as he contributes to it; an artist who has devoted his career to children but was rarely home to take care of his own; an environmentalist who can’t bear to give up his cigarettes or wheezing car; a professed Luddite who revels in the mechanics of modern vehicles but tries “not to draw them in a fashion that further feeds an infatuation with power,” as he has written; a pacifist who loves warplanes; a brooder with a dark view of how civilization has squandered the gifts of the planet, who nevertheless makes films that affirm the urgency of human life.“Untitled” (2021), by Elliott Robbins. “Miyazaki’s films were some of my earliest exposure to foreign cinema,” the artist says. “Because so much of his interest is to look to his own culture for inspiration, as an outsider, I feel that Miyazaki’s films create space for a viewer to compare the differences in the nuances of their own lived experience, as well as to connect to what is universal in his stories.”Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joshua ScottThis embrace of contradictions may be why Miyazaki’s movies, although beloved in the West (if not as wildly successful as in Japan, where his last five films combined took in close to 100 billion yen in their first release, or around $873 million), in some ways thwart the Western mind. Absent are the dominating themes of monotheism — a fall from an original state of grace, followed by redemption — and a clear dichotomy of good and evil. “I’m not a god who decides on what is good and bad,” Miyazaki tells me. “We as humans make mistakes.” In his world, there are few outright villains or even truly bad characters, only characters who do bad things. Lady Eboshi wreaks havoc on the forest in “Princess Mononoke” but also gives sanctuary to brothel workers and those afflicted with leprosy. No-Face, the gliding black shroud who eats people in “Spirited Away,” turns out to be simply lonely and, when soothed, spits out his victims. Even the mutant stampeding army of trilobite-like behemoths from the toxic jungle in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” (1984), who kill the heroine by flinging her into the air and trampling her underfoot, end up restoring her to life with the touch of their golden antennae.So Disney was never an influence. (Miyazaki has gone so far as to say, in a 1988 lecture, that he hated Disney’s movies and their easy sentimentality: “To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.”) Instead, Miyazaki looked to works like the French animator Paul Grimault’s “The King and the Mockingbird” (released in different forms in 1952 and 1980), in which a chimney sweep and a shepherdess flee from a vain and despised tyrant king through a cavernous 296-story castle while a coterie of animals mounts a revolution, and the Armenian animator Lev Atamanov’s “The Snow Queen” (1957), whose heroine self-effacingly sacrifices her shoes to a river to beg for help in finding her lost friend, and whose gleefully amoral, knife-wielding Robber Girl — who captures the heroine and steals her bonnet and muff, then is horrified and furious to find herself moved to tears by her victim’s tale of woe — is a forerunner to the wolf girl of “Princess Mononoke.”Curiously, considering the limitations on women’s professional progress in Japan (which makes the country an outlier among developed nations), Miyazaki’s heroines outnumber his heroes. Within the world of anime, these characters are called shojo, girls of an in-between age, no longer quite children and not yet women; but where shojo were typically passive figures subject to romance narratives, Miyazaki’s girls display formidable know-how and independence. They take on jobs, organize households, fight battles and rescue boys from near death — all matter-of-factly, without ever trumpeting notions of girl power. Although some are princesses, they resist the trappings of fairy tales: Princess Mononoke doesn’t live in a palace. Chihiro, in “Spirited Away,” is awkward and lacks the big eyes that traditionally signify beauty and vulnerability in anime, while Sophie, the mousy milliner in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” spends most of the movie in the guise of a stooped old woman. Even when the spell is broken and her youth returns, her hair remains gray. It’s a reminder that something has been forever lost; that, even with the most powerful magic, there can be no reset, no starting over.Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli’s producer, photographed at the company’s Tokyo offices on Oct. 4, 2021, alongside plush versions of, from left, the characters Totoro and Catbus from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).Takahiro KaneyamaAmerican animated films of today, by contrast, still tend to culminate in a happily ever after, or at least a vanquishing of foes. (“We have a desire for closure,” Niebel says.) Miyazaki offers something more nebulous and even unsettling. The resurrection in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” is a stark exception, for elsewhere in his oeuvre, death is not defeated, only at best delayed. Prince Ashitaka in “Princess Mononoke,” whose body has been progressively consumed by the dark stain of a curse, is never completely cured; a shadow remains on his arm, and he is separated from the girl he loves by a sense of duty — he to the humans of Iron Town, she to the wolves of the forest — although they promise to visit each other. Cruelty, too, is not so much punished as neutralized, as when the youthful-appearing Witch of the Waste in “Howl’s Moving Castle” is reinstated to her true age and revealed to be a doddering old lady, whom Sophie spoon-feeds without complaint, despite still suffering from the witch’s curse. Recovery may be possible, but not full restitution.In a 1991 directorial memo for “Porco Rosso,” a farce that includes a preening American pilot eyeing a career as a Hollywood star and a snarling gang of sky pirates who prove helpless when confronted with a gaggle of schoolgirls, Miyazaki cautions, “We must treat every character respectfully. We must love their foolishness. … One common mistake — the belief that to draw a cartoon is to draw someone sillier than oneself — must be avoided at all costs.” At the heart of the film is a hard-bitten bounty hunter who takes on the guise of a pig out of a sense of guilt at having survived World War I while his fellow pilots died. (Miyazaki describes the film to me as “a boy’s dream.”) The woman he loves but doesn’t believe he deserves laments this “curse,” but only he can free himself from it, by no longer condemning that part of himself.“In the town that I live in, I have precious friends, but I also have people I detest,” Miyazaki tells me. “That is what human society is all about.” Even his friends are flawed, and not just them. He says, “It’s a mirror of who I am.”IT IS TEMPTING to read Miyazaki’s protestations as simple humility, and to cast him, against his will, as a sort of secular saint. In many ways he fits the part: the benevolent neighborhood uncle who brings joy to children through his work, picks up trash from the river on his days off and, over the past two and a half decades, has made quiet pilgrimages to a sanitarium near his home for patients with leprosy who, for much of the 20th century, faced segregation by law in such facilities. One patient became a friend, and Miyazaki held his hand when he was dying.“(New) Spirits Away” (2021) by James Yaya Hough, who says, “As an African American artist, I have been influenced by decades of great anime from Japan but deeply impacted by my own social and cultural experiences of race, mass incarceration and American history/culture. It’s through this lens that I connect with some of the strongest themes in Miyazaki’s body of animation: the struggle of the human spirit, self-discovery and love.”Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joshua ScottBut Takahata, Miyazaki’s mentor at Toei Animation in the ’60s and ’70s and, eventually, his greatest rival, dismisses this hagiography in the afterword to “Starting Point” (1996), a collection of Miyazaki’s early interviews, lectures and essays, writing, “Hayao Miyazaki is a man who struggles. … He weeps, is playful, loves people, expects too much of their talents, howls at his broken dreams, becomes enraged.” The brilliant and notoriously perfectionist Takahata, who once took eight years to finish a film, died in 2018, but he still casts a shadow; Miyazaki spent 15 years working with Takahata before becoming a director himself, and even though his movies at Studio Ghibli consistently outperformed Takahata’s at the box office, he still craved his mentor’s approval. (Suzuki, in a 2014 memoir, insists that Takahata is the only viewer whom Miyazaki has ever wanted to please.)Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More