My Miyazaki Ranking: Part Two – Princesses & Pigs
Saturday, March 23, 2024 at 5:00PM 
If you've ever seen the Never-Ending Man documentary, you'll be familiar with Hayao Miyazaki's complex relationship with new technologies, in animation and otherwise. The film's most famous quote relates to AI, which the Ghibli co-founder strongly feels is "an insult to life itself." However, there's more to it since Miyazaki has attempted and succeeded in combining the possibilities of CGI with traditional techniques. You can see this in the same non-fiction work as the director unsteadily creates Boro, the Caterpillar, one of those shorts exclusively screened at the Ghibli Park and Museum. Still, even as the result may dazzle, the process to get there is a barrage of frustrations for the old master.
Today's Miyazaki tryptic goes against hybridized approaches. Instead, it finds an embrace of hand-drawn animation in its purest form, divested of computerized witchcraft and the like…