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.”1
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. I used to draw larger, but it got more and more troublesome, so they became smaller and smaller.
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. Recalling his own time on Horus, Yasuo Otsuka wrote, “[N]o matter how much I drew, my drawing skill couldn’t match Miyazaki-san’s.”2
Soon, Miyazaki’s drawing ability matured further, and that roughness became a purposeful looseness. Horus began in 1965 and premiered in ‘68, and Miyazaki remained at Toei Doga for a few more years. He contributed concept art to Animal Treasure Island (1971) and others — visibly growing as an artist.
By 1971, when Miyazaki left Toei to work on Takahata’s unmade Pippi Longstocking, his image boards had real charm and warmth. The art doesn’t aim for perfection, but the character and atmosphere in it make the project feel real.
Image boards like these poured out of Miyazaki during the 1970s. He drew them for actual productions, pitches, pipe dreams. He was establishing himself as an expert at inventing and fleshing out animated worlds — initially, Takahata’s 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).
A Miyazaki memory of the Panda era:
… when I read the wording of the proposal that Isao Takahata-san had quickly written up, I felt my heart swell in anticipation — I could create a wonderful world. The excitement remained without dissipating.3
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. “Heidi was entirely Paku-san’s world,” Miyazaki said, using Takahata’s nickname. He was often too busy drawing to attend Heidi’s meetings.4
On Takahata projects like 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), Miyazaki grew more and more frustrated. They felt like a grind to him. “After Heidi, I didn’t have my whole heart in my work,” he said. Takahata’s shows were moving into naturalism and objectivity, and away from the fantasies of Pippi and Panda.5
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, even if they didn’t wind up on TV.
Around then, in the mid-1970s, he sketched a certain visual for My Neighbor Totoro. It was the bus stop scene in the rain.6
Miyazaki dreamed of making something cartoony, fun and wild again, and it manifested on the page. Totoro was born as an extrapolation of Panda. “Panda is a very big-hearted, easygoing character,” Miyazaki later wrote. “He makes those around him happy just by being there, without doing anything in particular. In that respect Totoro and Panda are similar for me.”
From there, Miyazaki’s image boards grew, and he became a better and better artist. Yet, at this early stage of his career, he’d already used them to define his most iconic visual.
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. Back then, animation carried the old-fashioned name manga eiga in Japan, and its representatives were cartoons like Fleischer’s Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941).
“[W]hen I worked on Future Boy Conan, I did not try to make ‘animation’ as we usually think of it, but a manga, or a cartoon film,” he noted.7
Although satisfying to do, Conan was a middling performer in ratings. Miyazaki bounced from there to his first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro — another attempt at manga eiga. It flopped. He later recalled:
The Castle of Cagliostro was like a clearance sale of all I had done on Lupin and during my early Toei days. I don’t think I added anything new. I can understand why people who had followed my work were extremely disillusioned. You can’t use a sullied middle-aged guy to create fresh work that will wow viewers. I realized I should never do this again. Neither did I want to. Even so, I did two more (television series New Lupin episodes 145, 155), and it was hell. With every piece I made it was obvious that I was just trotting out everything I had done before. [laughs] Nineteen eighty was my 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. As mentioned in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions, “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.”
Some of these drawings appeared in the book Hayao Miyazaki Image Board (1983), published when Miyazaki’s career was still struggling. He was involved in the Sherlock Hound TV series in the early ‘80s — it fell apart after a few episodes, only to be finished by another team. And he got sucked into the vortex of Little Nemo, a feature film that Hollywood wanted to make in collaboration with Japan.
“I ended up trying out all the different motifs I’d been carrying around with me,” Miyazaki said of Nemo.8 Each and every one of them was rejected. But, in the process, he even further developed the ideas in his image boards. This new trove started to be unleashed in Nausicaä (1984), a film far removed from the manic adventure-comedies he’d gotten known for.
Once again, his evolution showed in his sketches before it hit the screen. Miyazaki had gained new reference points after Cagliostro — like Heavy Metal magazine artists Mœbius and Richard Corben (Rowlf). Their stuff, with its underground-comix leanings, seeped into his image boards across the early ‘80s.9
Around the same period, he saw the animation of Frédéric Back and Yuri Norstein, in which he felt a richness beyond anything he knew from mainstream Japanese animation. It made him feel inadequate, and pushed him. The sense that his films were “manga,” or cartoons, began to put him “in a bad mood.”10
When Nausicaä reached theaters, it wasn’t simply a cartoon anymore. And that turn had started in his image boards. Soon, one of Miyazaki’s stray sketches of a floating castle, done in the early ‘80s, became the blueprint for Castle in the Sky (1986). In My Neighbor Totoro, two years later, even his bus stop drawing was realized on film — just deeper and richer now.
Since the 1960s, Miyazaki has kept to the same pencil-and-watercolor approach, plus the occasional inks, for his image boards. It’s casual, comfortable and fast. To him, he’s just jotting things down. As he said in the ‘90s:
… the idea is not to spend an infinite amount of time creating these things, but to do them as quickly as possible. It’s a totally different approach than most people use when painting with transparent watercolors. In what is completely my own style of doing things, I first draw in pencil, and then quickly trace over that with watercolor, all the while trying to render as many images as possible, with as little effort as possible [laughs], as fast as possible.11
Every Miyazaki movie originates from this jotting habit: his collection, reuse and exploration of ideas on paper. In one proto-Nausicaä image board, you find the same U-shaped arrowhead that appeared over 40 years later in The Boy and the Heron.
He’s always been self-deprecating about the art itself. In the ‘00s, he joked about its crudeness in his guide to watercolors. “Forty years of nothing but this!” yells his pig character. Then a caterpillar mocks him: this method is “all he can do.” A dog later says, “I wonder if he could paint a little more properly.”
But the energy of Miyazaki’s image boards — the loose pencil lines drawn with no erasing, the splashes of watercolor thrown around the page — shouldn’t be underestimated. At Toei, his concept art was sometimes outdone by others’ work. In the end, he took the lead. By the late ‘80s, a powerfully assured technique was visible in these sketches he tossed off so quickly.
There’s a feeling that the Miyazaki of Princess Mononoke, then in his 50s, could draw whatever he needed to draw. That was true in his storyboards as well. Yet so many of his visuals were image boards first, concept sketches on his sketch pile.
In 2001, the year Spirited Away premiered, Miyazaki turned 60. He’d felt washed up 21 years before, but this became his biggest hit, and most chaotically creative film, by that time. A lot of its success was right there in pencil and watercolor, where Miyazaki’s ideas had never been wilder or more concretely rendered. You saw the same in his sketches for Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo.
Every line and form is wobbly, but the impression is sharp, exact and effortless. The artist from Horus, all those decades before, was gone. The page was now an open conduit for Miyazaki’s imagination.
When The Boy and the Heron started, Miyazaki was in his mid-70s. The film took seven years. In 2023, ex-Ghibli animator Kenichi Yoshida said in an interview that he still met with Miyazaki to chat from time to time. It was different from before, though. “Miyazaki… is an old man now; he’s the same generation as my parents,” said Yoshida.
And yet the power of Miyazaki’s ideas had, in many ways, never been stronger. His image boards for The Boy and the Heron show a master’s touch, an absolute clarity of imagination. It’s not the phantasmagoria of Spirited Away, but he could still mesmerize with a sketch, and that lifted the film. An anecdote from the production proves it.
When producer Toshio Suzuki was creating the Japanese poster for The Boy and the Heron, something clicked. It wasn’t just him — even Miyazaki agreed, for once. Like Suzuki said a few years ago:
… I’ve been doing movies since, what, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and that poster is the first thing Hayao Miyazaki has ever really praised me for. He said, “Suzuki-san, this is amazing.” … He said it was the best I’ve done. That served as a hint. “So, let’s just go with this!” So, no trailers. Absolutely no TV spots. We’ll do it all. No newspaper ads!12
Suzuki’s mysterious, unplaceable poster helped to lead The Boy and the Heron to Ghibli’s biggest opening in Japan. The film went on to sweep the world. And what appeared on the original Japanese poster is a small snippet — carefully cropped and zoomed — of a Hayao Miyazaki image board.13
2. Newsbits
We lost Barry Caldwell (68), the veteran storyboarder.
There’s discourse in Nigeria about state support for artists. It turns out that “over $600 million in funding is available to Nigerian animators and comic creators, yet the majority of studios have not applied.” See The ACE for more.
In America, some of the government’s moves last year to defund PBS and NPR were overturned by the courts.
The Palestinian artist Ahmad Adawy won a Mahmoud Kahil Award for his illustrations. His former animation company, Cube Studio, was based in Gaza.
There’s a government plan in Armenia to revive the dormant Armenfilm — a vital studio in the country’s Soviet era. Animator Robert Sahakyants made classics like Wow, a Talking Fish! there in the ‘80s.
Last weekend in Cuba, the children’s animation workshops hosted by Academia Animaluz continued, despite a power outage due to the American blockade. (For more on current life in Cuba, see these accounts.)
Scholar Pavel Shvedov wrote about the loss of the “middle generation” in Russian auteur animation. The recent Suzdalfest was populated mostly by newcomers and seasoned veterans; many of the artists in between have left the country or switched focus.
An American theater, Metrograph in Manhattan, is screening Czech animation in April — including The Pied Piper and The Revolt of the Toys.
We revealed a few months ago that the lost Mexican feature Roy from Space has been found and is being restored. Deaf Crocodile is now crowdfunding the final parts of the release, and there’s a trailer with footage.
Fonzieland did an interesting profile on artist Teri Hendrich Cusumano, who spearheaded labor reforms in American animation but has since left the industry.
Last of all: a flashback to the Disney Channel’s miniature festival of animation from around the world.
Until next time!
From the book Hayao Miyazaki Image Board (1983), used as a source for all of Miyazaki’s comments on Horus.
See Otsuka’s essay in Little Norse Prince Valiant Roman Album.
From Starting Point (“Panda in Process”). We also used “Panda! Go, Panda! Creator’s Message” from the same collection.
See the interviews with Toshitsugu Saida and Miyazaki in Future Boy Conan: Film 1/24 Special Issue (1979). As Miyazaki said:
Until that time, whenever I worked together with Paku-san, without fail, we had detailed discussions about the storylines and the next steps to take, and as we laid there talking and arguing, a common idea welled up in us, and we decided to draw it. That was how it went. However, since around Heidi, just the work on screen design and layout was taking too long. I left the story all to Paku-san, and I ended up just handling the storyboards that came in.
See Starting Point (“Miyazaki on His Own Works”), used a few times, plus Takahata’s article in Animage (August 1981) and his long interview about Anne in the book Thoughts While Making Movies.
See this article from All the Anime for details.
From Starting Point (“On Creating Animation”).
This is also from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions.
Miyazaki mentioned running into Jean Giraud’s work during 1980 in this interview. More recently, in the foreword to Rowlf and Other Fantasy Stories (2025), he wrote, “I chanced upon Rowlf around the time I was wondering what to do for my next work after I had completed Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro.”
See Miyazaki’s conversations with Teruo Harada in Monthly Out (September 1983) and Baku Yumemakura in Animage (February 1986).
Again from Starting Point (“The Pictures Are Already Moving Inside My Head”).
From Unseen Japan.
Today’s lead story is a revised and expanded reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter, behind the paywall, on December 14, 2023.
A great deep dive! I remember being silent after seeing The Boy and the Heron as well. It was Howl’s all over again for me.
This is wonderful. Miyazaki actually visited Pixar years ago when I was working there, and the reverence for this kind of visual development work was very tangible. The image boards, color scripts, and concept art that get developed to shape the emotional journey of a film have always been one of my favorite parts of working in animation as a lighting artist. They really are the emotional blueprint that everything else is built on.
Seeing these boards collected and analyzed like this is stunning. Thank you for the work you put into these pieces. And thank you for the generous mention of my Teri profile in the newsbits section - that means a great deal 🙏