Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki started at the bottom of the industrial animation system, working as an in-between artist at Toei, drawing the frames that sit between other people's drawings. Born in Tokyo in 1941, he spent the 1960s and 1970s inside television production, directed his first feature in 1979 with The Castle of Cagliostro, and made Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind in 1984, whose success let him and Isao Takahata found Studio Ghibli.

What separates him from every other major animation director is what he chooses to spend frames on. Nobody else stops a film for a girl watching rain fall at a bus stop, or for bread being torn, or for a long silence in a field. His action is superb and his stillness is the point: the films are built so that the quiet passages carry the emotional weight and the flying carries the joy. He also refuses the usual moral architecture. Princess Mononoke has no villain, only people with incompatible needs. Spirited Away punishes greed and forgives nearly everyone. The Wind Rises is about a man who makes beautiful machines for a monstrous purpose and declines to resolve it.

Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and remains the high-water mark for the form. He has announced retirement more than once and returned each time, most recently with The Boy and the Heron, a strange, grieving, deliberately difficult film made in his eighties that took the same Oscar two decades later along with a Golden Globe. Ghibli's house style is imitated worldwide and has never been matched, because the imitators copy the look and not the patience.