japanamerica

I first interviewed Hayao Miyazaki for Japanamerica in the early aughts. I was very fortunate. It was the usual story--a friend of a friend of a friend, and so on. He was a bit tight-lipped at first but relaxed and opened up when he realized that I was no otaku .  Later I was invited to interview him live onstage at UC Berkeley in California ( video here ), and we've had a few informal chats since.  When he was awarded a second Oscar this year (third if you count his 2014 honorary statuette), I gave interviews to the BBC, CNN and The Guardian , in addition to a couple of online Japanese media.    The business has undergone a revolution since our first meeting for Japanamerica . File-sharing and streaming media have made Japanese pop culture in general and anime in particular a content goldmine. The reputation of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli has grown in prominence over the past 20 years, partly owing to its rich and unparalleled catalog of quality content, but also...

New book goes inside Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki Steve Alpert worked there for 15 years and knew major players Nikkei Asian Review TOKYO — Steve Alpert's book comes advertised as a business memoir, though you may find yourself grinning more often than annotating. For 15 years, starting in 1996, the American headed the international division at Studio Ghibli, Japan's most commercially and artistically successful anime company. As their first non-Japanese hire, he negotiated with clients from Asia, Europe and the U.S., supervised the English-language translations of "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away," voice-acted a character in Japanese for 2013's "The Wind Rises," and accepted awards on his employer's behalf at prestigious global film festivals. He also clinched the indie studio's nascent distribution deal with Disney, a coup to bring the films of Hayao Miyazaki into living rooms worldwide on VHS and DVD — and an Os...

Hayao Miyazaki: The never-ending story Last week, an NHK documentary chronicling Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement and un-retirement, “Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki” opened in select theaters across the United States. The same day on the other side of the world, his 1988 classic “My Neighbor Totoro” was released for the first time in theaters across China — 6,000 of them. Next month, Miyazaki will receive the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Career Achievement Award. In 2019, also in LA, the largest-ever exhibition of his work will inaugurate the prestigious Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Meanwhile, in Japan, Tokyo’s Shinbashi Enbujo Theater will stage a kabuki version of “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” Miyazaki’s 1984 sci-fi epic. And 2020 (or soon after) will see the premiere of “How Do You Live?,” his 12th feature film, followed by the opening of a Studio Ghibli theme park near Nagoya. Miyazaki held a press conference to announce his retirement in Septembe...

In less than a year, Tonko House earns an Oscar nomination By Roland Kelts They had plum roles at one of the best companies in the world and their successes were the envy of their peers. But last summer, two peak-career professionals quit their lucrative day jobs to found a start-up. With no income or investment, they built their own studio, mostly by hand, and started working long odd hours, seven days a week, on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California. Typical Silicon Valley fairy tale? Hardly. These two make animation. “I just felt like I had a lifelong dream to make art,” Tokyo-born, 40-year-old director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi told me at a café in Berkeley. “And that if I was going to do it, I better do it now.” Tsutsumi and his Tonko House Studio cofounder, Japanese-American 34-year-old Robert Kondo, both left positions at American industry giant Pixar Animation Studios last July — Kondo after 14 years, Tsutsumi after seven. Their resumes include gl...