The FRENCH edition of Hayao Miyazaki's "Daydream Note" artbook is coming this fall.

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1425079606316179&set=pcb.1425080792982727

https://www.catsuka.com/shopping/index.php?mode=produit&produit=hayao_miyazaki_daydream_note_fr

I just learned who did the outstanding artwork on the Lupin movie Castle of Cagliostro, and directed it... Miyazaki! And he was persuaded by Yasuo Otsuka!

Otsuka was the Animation Director, on the film, as well as Character Designer, and was a supervisor on the 1987 Lupin film The Fuma Conspiracy.

Otsuka teamed with Miyazaki for the 1969 Puss In Boots, involving the cast running around the castle battlements, which was the model for much of the action in Castle of Cagliostro.

 After Puss, Miyazaki and Takahata thought otherwise, joining their mentor Otsuka at A Production. Soon they were working together on the studio’s Lupin (the first TV version in 1971). 

Otsuka could draw shoot-outs and car chases to his heart’s content; he was also the show’s Animation Director. At first, he worked with Lupin’s creator Monkey Punch to adapt the manga to the screen. “But partway through, he quit,” Otsuka said. “He said it was too much for him.”

As a child, Otsuka hadn’t been inspired by cartoons, but rather by trains; the steam locomotives transporting Japanese soldiers near the town where he lived. “I had no idea such wonderful things existed… I walked all the way to the station on holidays.” This was trainspotting as a fabulous adventure and a creative dynamo for a boy artist. Otsuka remembered the engineers even letting him ride in the locomotives.

In 1945, his family moved to Yamaguchi. For Otsuka, the Occupation had a bonus – he could extend his sketching to army trucks at a nearby American base, and scavenged the soldiers’ discarded comics like Dick Tracy. His sketching was a welcome distraction from his first day job, at Yamaguchi’s Bureau of Statistics. He passed an exam for the Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry – not because he saw a career there, but he needed a pretext to move to Tokyo and (he hoped) become a political cartoonist.

Miyazaki was mentored by Otsuka after he joined Toei in 1963 straight after college. “Otsuka taught me all about motion,” Miyazaki says in the Joy documentary. 

Otsuka wasn’t just teaching new recruits. Between Hakujaden and Hols, he burnished his reputation as an animator on several other Toei films. The Joy documentary highlights his experience on 1959’s Magic Boy, where he animated a duel between the hero and a skeleton warrior. The effect was unintentionally comical, said Takahata, who was assistant director on the film. “The scene was so real, people laughed… We didn’t mean to make it humorous. It’s funny because it’s so serious… The more serious you play it, the funnier it gets.”

One need only visualise Zenigata in Lupin to see how this principle works in anime. In the years after Hols, Otsuka would be increasingly associated with comedy, and with animating funny adversaries like Zenigata. 

Miyazaki built up this association by writing a piece called “A Slanderous Portrait” (included in Starting Point), about his early acquaintance with Otsuka. According to Miyazaki, a “completely drunk” Otsuka roared off one night in his Fiat 500. He appeared mud-spattered the next morning, having buried the car in a road under construction. It’s easy to think that incident could have informed Lupin’s comedy too.

https://blog.alltheanime.com/yasuo-otsuka-1931-2021/

"The 2003 book Lupin III Perfect Book is a celebration of the show’s 30th anniversary. The interview goes over Yasuo Otsuka’s involvement in the license, the conditions of the show’s production and his relationship to other staff members, among others Hayao Miyazaki. 

I often put a Fiat 500 (Cinquecento) into the show, but that was for no better reason than because I had driven it in the past and understood its mechanisms and depicted them enticingly on-screen."

https://fullfrontal.moe/yasuo-otsuka-special-interview

Studio Ghibli never forgot the animator that helped its two core co-founders kickstart their careers. In 2004, Ghibli released a documentary Yasuo Otsuka's Joy of Motion (2004) celebrating his career, while an exhibition of his art was held in Tokyo in 2002. Miyazaki has spoken frequently about his gratitude for Otsuka. "For me he is an excellent mentor," he wrote in his 1982 essay "A 'Slanderous' Portrait." "We did some foolish things together, but we've also talked passionately about the future of animation. It was Otsuka-san who taught me the fun of working." 

 https://www.slashfilm.com/579990/yasuo-otsuka-dead/

As animation director on Lupin III, Ōtsuka was apparently encouraged by Miyazaki (who’d just taken over as director) to include the iconic Fiat 500 in the show — largely because Ōtsuka himself owned one at the time. Later, Ōtsuka drove the same car in a circuit around Kyushu, Japan’s third-largest island, as part of an extended road trip.

In the late ‘90s, Ōtsuka teamed up with Gainax to release a multimedia CD-ROM called Yasuo Ōtsuka Military 4×4 Graffiti. Utilizing Ōtsuka’s extensive knowledge on the subject (he’d been publishing doujinshi and authoring professional books on the subject for years) and personal collection of photos, the CD-ROM was an extended slideshow celebrating military vehicles

https://www.zimmerit.moe/the-cars-of-yasuo-otsuka/

https://halcyonrealms.com/books/yasuo-ohtsuka-mechanical-artworks-book-review/

there is a stage play of Totoro in London, extended til Aug 2026

Why am I posting about it on the car guy blog? Well, it's got a bus (sure, a cat bus - even cooler that was at Comic Con https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-terrific-photo-op-booth-in-studio.html) 

a bus stop, and is a Studio Ghibli production... that really nails it for me. Wish I could see it in person, live theater is incredible

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1240370328120442&set=pcb.1240371504786991

thank you Kim! The art of Juanjo Guarnido, two time Eisner Award winner, most well known for his character, and graphic novels of, Blacksad

Created for the exhibition and portfolio of the 50th anniversary of the Angouleme Festival. 

I have often taken advantage of the slightest opportunity to honor my comic book idols, heroes as authors, in images where I take a clever pleasure in recreating them. 

It was as delightful as opportune for the occasion to gather many, connected for me somehow to Angouleme and its festival so international, to evoke, even vaguely, the relief of this city, perched like the one where I grew up on a rock, and to pay homage supported to two greats of the drawing, two friends too, recently and far too soon gone: Tim Sale and Kim JungGi.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=736620397820301&set=a.325070832308595

Art Veider is a St Petersberg based artist who recently drew a trio of Ghibli fan art pieces

 https://www.mrjakeparker.com/blog/2023/11/22/the-kinetic-ghibli-fan-art-of-art-veider

Miyazaki's Airships (skip the first minute)

I just learned that Studio Ghibli made the animation for a music video in 1995 "On Your Mark"

This isn't the music video, it's a description/review of it... so you understand a little of what the video is about

   

According to the book "Studio Ghibli, the Complete Works" the storyline for the video is that in the future, people have been forced underground by radioactive contamination and disease. Armed police officers storm a skyscraper with a flashing neon sign that which reads "Saint Nova's Church". When the pink aircraft the police use crashed through the building, notice the religious fanatics are armed with rifles, as if anticipating a battle. Two of the officers rescue a winged girl from deep within the building, but the authorities take custody of her as an experimental subject. Unable to put her out of their minds the two officers put together a plan to rescue the winged girl and return her to the sky. In the film, Miyazaki repeats key scenes but leads each one to different endings, adroitly expressing the many possibilities the future holds

Finally, happy good news about the steampunk Miyazaki series Sherlock Hound! It's streaming on Amazon Prime!

 

I learned about this series in 2015 and posted about it  https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2015/05/for-fans-of-miyazaki-sherlock-holmes.html

A new movie poster for Kiki's Delivery Service

contemporary art gallery Spoke Art commissioned Matt Taylor to create a special tribute poster honoring the Studio Ghibli gem, “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, he made it from a collage of screen shots from the movie

https://beautifulbizarre.net/2024/08/08/matt-taylor-kikis-delivery-service/

https://www.matttaylor.co.uk/

https://www.instagram.com/posterescape/

all the pages of Miyazaki's artwork for his movies that were in his early magazine of concepts, are online

there are a LOT, these are only a sample

https://www.tumblr.com/the-art-of-dieselpunk-war

have you seen the opening sequence of The Wind Rises?

skip the first 45 seconds

a terrific photo op booth in the Studio Ghibli booth

Porco Rosso, a Studio Ghibli film made in 1992, originally planned as a short in-flight film for Japan Airlines based on Hayao Miyazaki's manga The Age of the Flying Boat, but grew into a feature-length film.

It is based on "The Age of the Flying Boat", a 15 page, three-part 1989 watercolor manga by Miyazaki that also inspired Disney's Duck Tales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porco_Rosso

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hik%C5%8Dtei_Jidai

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/07/23/hikotei-jidai-the-age-of-the-flying-boat/hikotei-jidai-the-age-of-the-flying-boat.pdf

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/porco-rosso/id1381507437?i=1000562427727

https://www.rotoscopers.com/2017/04/03/studio-ghibli-countdown-porco-rosso/

Studio Ghibli theme park looks amazing

https://twitter.com/cartoonbrew/status/1570430363922534401 for a dozen more images

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/theme-parks/check-out-ghibli-park-in-action-in-the-latest-video-shared-by-the-studio-221314.html

from the Secret World of Arrietty

a Studio Ghibli movie that is basically The Borrowers book from 1952. I loved those books.

John Goodman and Hugh Laurie were in a 1998 live action movie. This Studio Ghibli movie moves a lot slower, much more peacefully, and a bit closer to the books. 

I just learned there is a Facebook page for planes with cars photos

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=3253957901504452&set=gm.3103096356570711

https://www.facebook.com/groups/568127127055465/posts/1201235473744624

for more on the Junkers see https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2020/04/hayao-miyazaki-and-studio-ghibli-have.html

and https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2016/02/junkers-g38-amazing-aircraft-with.html for detailed images

the Pan Am Sikorsky S-42 Clipper Ship at Pan American Dinner Key Airport in 1938.

Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have really been artistic treasures

The Junkers G.38 was a large German four-engined transport aircraft which first flew in 1929.

 The G.38 was featured in the 2013 semi-fictional movie ''The Wind Rises'' by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, as was Hugo Junkers.

https://dailytimewaster.blogspot.com/2020/04/nicely-illustrated.html

cool. Clever photography composition as well

If you don't get it, you have missed out on the Studio Ghibli animated movies, which are about the most amazing ever not made by Disney or Pixar

Found on https://www.facebook.com/garage.motor.style?fref=nf

For fans of Miyazaki, Sherlock Holmes, and the brass era vehicles... The Sherlock Hound cartoons of the mid 1980s, a lot of Miyazaki's that I've just learned of, having thought I'd seen all the works of the master. Tremendous thrill to discover previously unknown animation!

before he co-founded Studio Ghibli, and went on to making award-winning films, Miyazaki worked on various kinds of animation for different media and pitched at different levels of seriousness. One of the most notable projects of that chapter of his career transposed the adventures of Sherlock Holmes into a world of anthropomorphic dogs.

The Italian-Japanese co-production Sherlock Hound aired as a television series between 1984 and 1985. Of its 26 episodes, which sent the corgi Sherlock Hound and terrier Doctor Watson after a variety of thieves and on all sorts of adventures across a steampunk London, Miyazaki directed six.

In the Miyazaki-directed episode “Treasure Under the Sea” for instance, the detecting duo go after a submarine purloined by recurring antagonist of both Holmes and Hound, Professor Moriarty, who here takes the form of a wolf. “The Sovereign Gold Coins” finds Hound and Watson in pursuit of that seemingly more traditional stripe of criminal known as a safecracker, and in “Mrs. Hudson is Taken Hostage,” their landlady (who seems considerably more youthful in Miyazaki’s vision than the matron in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s) goes missing, though her kidnapper badly underestimates the difficulty of pulling off his plan under Hound’s watch.

Miyazaki would direct three more episodes (“The Stormy Getaway,” “The Crown of Mazalin,” and “The Four Signatures”) before a rights dispute with Conan Doyle’s estate threw a wrench into production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKsFURf7C18&list=ELJ7W8YJE1z_8 for the 1st season

https://www.youtube.com/user/TMSanime/search?query=sherlock for many more

Learned of it from http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/hayao-miyazakis-sherlock-hound.html