GoKawiilA proto- Totoro image board by Hayao Miyazaki, courtesy of The Art of My Neighbor Totoro
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.”
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