Hayao Miyazaki's Image Boards

From the 1960s to now.

A Miyazaki image board for Spirited Away (2001)

Watching The Boy and the Heron 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 82, Hayao Miyazaki has reinvented himself again. You can’t find the director of My Neighbor Totoro (1988) in this film, just as it was hard to see a link between Totoro and The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Miyazaki has always changed and adapted since his career began at Toei Doga in 1963 — 60 years 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.”¹

Like we noted on Sunday, Horus 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. At first I drew larger, but it got more and more troublesome, so they became smaller and smaller.