All stills from 'Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki' and courtesy of NHK World TV.When Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement in 2013 – "quite serious" this time – documentary director Kaku Arakawa was skeptical. He first met the animator in 2005 and started filming behind the scenes of his productions Ponyo (2008) and The Wind Rises (2013)."I personally didn't want him to retire," says Arakawa. "I continued to visit his studio and to interview him, this time without the camera. We would chat and drink the coffee that Miyazaki made. At that time, Miyazaki often said, 'I'm finished, just leave me alone.'"
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Arakawa's disbelief in his subject's intentions paid off, because it meant he was there to film a documentary when he decided to work again.Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki begins with Miyazaki's retirement, leads up to his decision to make the short film Boro the Caterpillar, shows him working on that project and ends with him deciding to make yet another full-length film and beginning work on that. Shot with a single handheld camera and no crew, Arakawa's film provides a fascinating insight into the director's life, disposition and the highs and lows he went through to finally decide on making another proper film.These are the revelations from both an interview VICE conducted with director Kaku Arakawa and the first UK screening of the director's cut, hosted by NHK World TV."After I finished filming I visited him to let him know the documentary was finished and had been broadcast on NHK," director Kaku Arakawa told VICE. "Miyazaki had never seen any of the films I made about Studio Ghibli, in which he featured, nor did he even watch Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki. But when Miyazaki's long-standing producer, Toshio Suzuki, told him the title, Miyazaki said it could also be called 'The Man Who Couldn't Stop'. That's because something – karma – was driving him to continue with filmmaking beyond his will."
Miyazaki hasn't even seen the documentary
He does his best philosophising over coffee and a cigarette
Old age is a persistent theme in his life
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But his drive to work is completely relentless
The battle against hand-drawn animation is being won by CGI
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While Miyazaki being alive and working means traditional animation isn't dead, it feels like the end is nigh. At one point, a group of techies who are working on "deep learning" AI pitch Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki their dream of replacing human animators entirely with machines who can learn to paint naturally as humans. Miyazaki shuts them down in a heated speech that leaves the camera to pan across their dejected faces. As Suzuki tells the camera at the start of the doc, the Ghibli animation team was disbanded when Miyazaki retired, and at the end, when Suzuki and Miyazaki discuss the new film they wonder where they can even find enough of the right animators to complete it.
Young people give him life
He may have desired a true successor but he'll never have one
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