alt.hn

4/6/2026 at 7:56:34 AM

The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

 https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-image-boards-of-hayao-miyazaki

by vinhnx

4/7/2026 at 10:31:03 PM

He used to make a lot of short illustrated stories too. My favourite is 'Imouto He' because I love the plane concept - there is really nothing like it and I wonder if an aerospace engineer could look at it and spot any reasons it couldn't exist.

https://ghiblicon.blogspot.com/2008/03/imoto-he-for-my-siste...

by msuniverse2026

4/7/2026 at 11:37:02 PM

Not an aerospace engineer, but I think it looks borderline plausible and simultaneously very unsafe.

Having the propeller so high up relative to the center of mass is going to produce a massive pitch down moment: because there's only a small horizontal stabilizer, it would require very aggressive thrust vectoring or elevon usage. A fly-by-wire control system would be essential, I think.

The anhedral wing angle would make it even more unstable, and there is really no reason for it here except aesthetics. Seaplanes with wing-mounted propellers could benefit from the extra clearance, but the propeller is not even on the wing here.

See the 737 MAX for how this kind of pitch instability can go very wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

by seabass-labrax

4/7/2026 at 10:11:05 PM

Seeing Miyazaki’s Pippi makes me so sad that we never got to see that movie. I’ve been reading a ton of Astrid Lindgren with my kid lately, and for many of them I see them in my mind’s eye as Myazaki films, and especially Pippi. Myazaki and Lindgren have a lot in common, I think, in how they tell stories from children’s perspectives. What we’ve got for Pippi movie adaptations instead are very poor things.

by ostacke

4/7/2026 at 8:24:13 PM

I highly recommend the NHK documentary "10 years with Hayao Miyazaki" that shows how he works (and also his sometimes difficult character).

by tralarpa

4/7/2026 at 10:50:55 PM

That documentary is a must-watch for any Miyazaki fan. They recorded the entire creation of Ponyo, from Miyazaki's watercolors to the final released movie.

It also shows why the movie ends as abruptly as it does and why Ghibli was eventually disbanded. With Takahata gone everything was bottlenecked by Miyazaki's himself, and he was simultaneously crumbling under the pressure and refusing to let anyone else have creative input in the studio.

by Maken

4/8/2026 at 5:21:16 AM

For those interested, the documentary can be found in the video section of the Internet Archive.

by Marcan

4/6/2026 at 10:12:04 AM

Thank you for sharing the image boards! They're very rare and impressed me. How have you found them?

by Shogo_Kaneda

4/7/2026 at 11:31:30 PM

You're welcome! I shared from AnimationObsessive's blog, and they did a great deal of research and showed the drawing image boards on paper from Mr. Hayao Miyazaki himself and the studio. This article I find unique, and some images have not been seen or public before. I recommend subscribing to their blog for more animation articles.

by vinhnx

4/7/2026 at 7:33:09 PM

There's always a "courtesy of..." under each image board and it seems like it's all books released for each film.

by mdurana

4/7/2026 at 8:12:15 PM

also, the inaugural special exhibition for the new Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences museum in LA was on Miyazaki; they somehow gathered all these boards and notebooks in one place for several months. This was magical, and I give the curators props for doing this; they could have easily started off with a self-celebratory American/Hollywood franchise...

But I think they released a exhibition book to go along with this that has a lot of his artwork in there as well

by caycep

4/7/2026 at 7:31:42 PM

> Future Boy Conan

That's what that giant flying wing warship is from

by ge96

4/8/2026 at 3:20:21 AM

What the hell, many of these look like complete frames in themselves! Crazy

by dartharva

4/8/2026 at 10:51:12 AM

And nowadays people believe that just setting a Ghibli filter on an AI image generator makes them Miyazaki's equal, because talent isn't real.

by krapp

4/8/2026 at 2:31:25 AM

[dead]

by zhao_