The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

Plus: news.

Welcome! This is a new issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s our plan this Sunday:

1. Miyazaki’s concept sketches. 2. Animation newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. Ideas on paper

Watching The Boy and the Heron, back in 2023, wasn’t a theater experience like any we’ve had. We were a little speechless when we stood up to go — the credits rolling, white letters on blue. A stranger seated toward the front row had clapped at the ending. Mostly, people were quiet.

At age 82, Hayao Miyazaki had reinvented himself again. It was hard to find the director of My Neighbor Totoro in The Boy and the Heron, just as the link between Totoro and The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) had been faint. Miyazaki’s changed and adapted since his career began at Toei Doga in 1963, more than six decades ago.

What’s stayed consistent is his habit of sketching ideas. His “image boards.”

“An image board is something drawn to prepare for a work,” Miyazaki once explained. They aren’t storyboards — they’re for loose ideas, not strict continuity. He did his first image boards at Toei: “I myself started naturally [drawing them] with Horus.”

Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968) was the debut film by the late Isao Takahata — Miyazaki’s close friend, rival, sounding board, foil and in some ways mentor. Miyazaki was a major artist on Horus, and one of several who drew its image boards. As he said:

Because they decided the overall feel of the film, and were the material that determined the direction of the story, it was necessary to draw as many as possible. I drew quickly and simply with a pencil and glossed it over with a single color — because it was the process of searching for a direction, I didn’t want to expend a lot of effort on each piece.

Loan words from English make up the Japanese term “image board” (imēji bōdo) — but the meaning of “image” drifted in translation. In Japanese, imēji refers to something more like a mental image, an impression, an idea. Which is to say that an image board is concept art.

That’s how Miyazaki’s endless Horus pieces were used. He noted that they were stuck to the studio’s walls to give everyone a feel for the project. “People who were participating in the preparation and those who weren’t could freely take a look at it, and go, ‘This is going to be interesting,’ or, ‘This is no good,’” Miyazaki remembered.

His Horus drawings could be rough, as if he’d jabbed them onto the page in a frenzy. He was young. His fellow artists on the film, like Yoichi Kotabe, often did cleaner work. But Miyazaki’s sketches had an energy, a range and a cinematic eye that jumped out. Soon, Miyazaki’s drawing ability matured further, and that roughness became a purposeful looseness.

By 1971, when Miyazaki left Toei to work on Takahata’s unmade Pippi Longstocking, his image boards had real charm and warmth. Image boards like these poured out of Miyazaki during the 1970s. He was establishing himself as an expert at inventing and fleshing out animated worlds. Along the way, he openly reused and reimagined his own past sketches. Tons of visual ideas from Pippi were recycled outright in Takahata’s Panda! Go, Panda! (1972).

Beginning with Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974), Miyazaki’s main work under Takahata shifted to layouts. These set up the camera, backgrounds and animation, and the workload was so huge that Miyazaki couldn’t contribute to the creative side. On Takahata projects like 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), Miyazaki grew more and more frustrated. Takahata’s shows were moving into naturalism and objectivity, and away from the fantasies of Pippi and Panda.

In this era, Miyazaki felt that he “lost sight of [his] own themes.” On the side, though, he kept coming up with ideas and putting them down in image boards. Around then, in the mid-1970s, he sketched a certain visual for My Neighbor Totoro. It was the bus stop scene in the rain.

Ultimately, Miyazaki’s frustrations forced him to quit working with Takahata. He moved to the TV series Future Boy Conan (1978), his directorial debut. And a torrent of his suppressed ideas emerged. He drew an almost scary number of image boards for Conan, all zany, off-the-wall creativity. His goal was to build on the bright-eyed fantasies of his childhood years, which he called manga eiga.

Although satisfying to do, Conan was a middling performer. Miyazaki bounced from there to his first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro — another attempt at manga eiga. It flopped. Nineteen eighty was his year of being mired in gloom. Miyazaki was about to turn 40, and he felt washed up. But his creativity hadn’t really run out. In a sense, it was only then being born.

His image boards continued in this era: a thousand ideas raced and morphed in his head. The drawings Miyazaki accumulated between 1980 and 1982 formed the basis of all his work, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Princess Mononoke.