Beyond the visuals of Studio Ghibli’s films, which are astonishing on their own accord, Miyazaki’s storytelling is what grounds these films as masterpieces. Kiki’s Delivery Service, the double feature of Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro, and Miyazaki’s latest and last film The Boy and the Heron are stories that are radically at odds with Hollywood storytelling, yet have a level of gravitas that is often overlooked as something wholly unique that can’t be taught. It just is. 

While we can’t teach you to create stories like Miyazaki — which is why Studio Ghibli stopped making films for almost a decade–there are trademarks of Miyazaki’s storytelling that we can learn from and mold into our own stories. Let’s get into it. 

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1.) Using the Kishōtenketsu Story Structure  

Rather than using the American standard three-act structure to tell his stories, Miyazaki’s stories follow a plot structure known as kishōtenketsu. Used since ancient times in Japan, kishōtenketsu is the method of storytelling composed of four parts: ki (introduction), shō (development), ten (turn or twist), and ketsu (conclusion).

While most stories have a rigged structure that is easy to follow and break down, kishōtenketsu has a wandering quality that can feel unusual to people who are not familiar with East Asian storytelling. The structure lends itself to a long, quiet beginning that is quickly twisted to shake up the story. In the end, the twist is settled, revealing the connecting theme between everything. Miyazaki always uses the kishōtenketsu structure in his storytelling, dividing his story into four parts. In the third part, there is always a big hurdle the hero must overcome to get to the end of the film. While the conflict might impact the story, it is not the focus. Instead, the story features a conflict, but the purpose of the story is the change in the protagonist. 

My Neighbor Totoro is the clearest example. It lacks a conflict, which has led many American critics to believe that nothing happens in the film. But the kishōtenketsu structure is at work, revealing that Satsuki and Mei are attempting to adjust to life without their mother. The sudden twist of Mei running away is shocking, but order is quickly restored. It is an easy film with a structure that isn’t overwhelming. There is more than one type of structure out there in the world of storytelling beyond the three-act structure. It is up to you to decide what type of structure fits your style of storytelling. 

Read More: The Simple Guide to Writing Animated Screenplays

A diagram of the kishōtenketsu structure (Courtesy of Randy Finch)

2.) Unfinished Scripts 

While the structure of Miyazaki’s stories is set, he typically doesn’t finish the story once his team is ready to start working on a film. A key part of Miyazaki’s filmmaking process is the creation of storyboards, a series of images that help map out a movie’s sequence of events. While storyboarding is an essential part of the animation process, Miyazaki tends to forego screenplays of spontaneity. 

“I don't have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film,” he said in a 2002 interview. “I usually don't have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keeping working on the film as it develops. It's a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that's the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it.”

At the core of his process, Miyazaki’s goal is to capture the beauty of the world he is creating. He can’t fully or clearly see them, nor does he know how his stories will end. Miyazaki leads the group of animators to find the film based on the few ideas he brings to them. 

Takahata, Miyazaki’s late mentor, explained the process in the 2000s:

Hayao Miyazaki stopped writing screenplays a long time ago. He doesn’t even bother to first finalize the storyboards. … After diving into the process, he then begins to create storyboards while doing all his other work, from key animation on down. Using his powers of continuous concentration, the production starts to take on the elements of an endlessly improvised performance.

Read More: Hayao Miyazaki Says 'Ma' is an Essential Storytelling Tool

Storyboard from 'Kiki's Delivery Service'

3.) Female Protagonist 

In a majority of Miyazaki’s films, the story is driven by strong female leads, who are brave girls or women who don’t think twice about fighting for what they believe is right. Inspired heavily by his own mother, Miyazaki’s female characters are complex and conflicted, like Princess Kushana in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, and the witches Yubaba and Zeniba in Spirited Away.

Miyazaki stated, “In my family, it was a very male universe. I only have brothers, the only woman was my mother.” Miyazaki is one of four brothers. Perhaps this is why mother figures in his work have such a grounding nature, while the female leads, inspired by his mother, are on a quest for self-fulfillment, helping each other and humanity along the way. They share a universal language of compassion, tolerance, and fairness. These female leads do not want to be anything other than themselves, which is a powerful message in itself. 

'Princess Mononoke'

4.) Flying Scenes 

Another childhood influence in Miyazaki’s work is his love for airplanes, particularly old ones. His family owned a company that produced wingtips for Zero fighters, and this is possibly what has led to each of Miyazaki’s stories containing flying scenes of some kind. From Tombo’s flying bicycle in Kiki’s Delivery Service to Haku’s transformation into a flying dragon that Chihiro eventually rides in Spirited Away, flying has become a staple of Miyazaki’s work. 

While flying is a key trademark of Miyazaki’s storytelling, the filmmaker tends to stay away from military aircraft. Miyazaki released the destructive power of military aircraft. This feeling of conflict Miyazaki feels is highlighted in The Wind Rises when Jiro Horikoshi dreams of building planes, but realizes the consequences that warplanes can have. 

'The Wind Rises'

5.) Conflicts Solved Through Pacifism 

What makes Hayao Miyazaki movies so beloved by a wide range of audiences is that his films do not depict any violence. That’s because Miyazaki, who grew up during World War II, despises unnecessary violence and advocates for pacifism through his stories. 

In multiple interviews that Kotaku found through Japanese blogs, Miyazaki spoke out about his disdain for violence in Hollywood films, saying, “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them. Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage.”

Hayao Miyazaki movies share a common theme that disputes can be resolved without the use of physical force. Castle in the Sky, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Princess Mononoke are examples of this since the main characters strive to bring peace to a world filled with conflict. Of course, physical confrontations are also present, but they are used to point out the uselessness of it.

'Howl's Moving Castle'

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Hayao Miyazaki movies are beautiful and meticulously crafted, taking a single film year to build from the few ideas that Miyazaki brings to his team at Studio Ghibli. While there are several trademarks that signify that a story belongs to this filmmaker, Miyazaki’s scripts are almost non-existent. Everything lives in the storyboards. While it is highly recommended that you finish a script before moving into the production process, there is beauty and a level of acceptance to Miyazaki’s creative process. 

Read More: 101 Enchanting Animation Story Prompts

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What is "Ma"? 

In an interview with film critic Roger Ebert from 2002, Ebert tells Miyazaki he appreciates what he calls “gratuitous motion” in his films, adding that, “Instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are,” said Ebert. 

Miyazaki answered with, “We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called Ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."

Spirited Away (2001)

Miyazaki then clapped his hands several times and said:

"The time in between my clapping is Ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb."

Read More: 101 Enchanting Animation Story Prompts

A Moment of Rest 

Using Ma allows the audience to reflect, imagine and interpret what is happening – not only visually, but emotionally. Instead of using dialogue to tell the audience how a character is feeling, Ma allows the audience to simply experience what the character is feeling along with them. 

Another way to think of Ma is like a gap, a pause, or a space between actions. In music, this pause is called a “rest” and balances the music with silence, which can have a very powerful effect by helping to build tension and suspense.

Hayao Miyazaki

Rests also help to create and maintain the rhythm for a piece of music, just as Ma helps to determine a rhythm in a story. Whenever there is a moment of silence or stillness in a movie or piece of music, the audience is able to prepare for the upcoming emotional or physical peak. 

Read More: WATCH: Domestic Trailer for Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises

Ma in Spirited Away

In this famous scene from Spirited Away, Ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino takes a train ride with a masked spirit called No-Face as she contemplates the world around her. While the train is moving, Chihiro is almost completely still. This allows the audience to see what she is seeing (the outside world passing by) and feel what she is feeling (being just a small part of a big world). 

Spirited Away (2001)

This scene is incredibly effective for several reasons. First, the music is just achingly beautiful and doesn’t overpower the images. The sounds of water around the train add a feeling of nature, adding to the smallness of the people who exist in the world. The color palette is pale and haunting, and the ghost has an ethereal, transparent quality. The other people on the train look like dark shadows, as if they might disappear in the night. At the end of the scene, the ripples in the water behind the train indicate a fleeting sense of purpose. The camera then zooms in on Chihiro’s face, making it clear we are still in her world as night falls and the train sputters away. Chihiro’s stillness juxtaposed with the moving train gives a sense of time and place that is unique to her character and absolutely gripping to watch. 

Read More: 5 Trademarks of a Hayao Miyazaki Movies

Use of Ma in American Films

In American films, Ma can be seen in the way filmmakers use pauses, stillness and the timing of shots to create tension, atmosphere, and emotional impact. To create suspense, directors often use moments of silence or slow pacing to build anticipation and heighten the impact of a sudden event. 

Theme Music From Jaws 

In this scene from Jaws, the famous music goes, “Dun, dun,” then pauses before another “dun, dun,” as the lady swims in the dark and murky ocean. The music symbolizes the shark (or life’s hidden dangers) and the audience comes to associate danger and dread with the unnerving music that stops and starts.  

Jaws (1975)

The Whisper Scene in Lost in Translation

In dialogue-driven films, the use of pauses and silence between lines can add meaning and weight to the spoken words. But sometimes silence says more than any line of dialogue ever could. Writer/Director Sophia Coppola had a stroke of genius by not letting the audience hear what Bob (Bill Murray) whispers to Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in this scene. In fact, they are standing in the middle of a busy Tokyo street and all the street sounds have been subdued to give emphasis to the quiet emotional moment the characters are sharing. 

Mexican Standoff in Reservoir Dogs

Writer/director Quentin Tarantino is known for bold violence and witty dialogue in his films, so there’s no chance of traditional Ma making its way into his movies. Instead, this Mexican standoff serves as a restful moment where the characters pause the action to reassess the situation and come up with a plan for moving forward. The characters are literally just standing there, with no action taking place so the audience can prepare for the bloodbath that’s about to come. 

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While the traditional concept of Ma may not be widely used in American filmmaking, the idea of creating tension, balance, and meaning through the use of pauses, silence and stillness are certainly popular techniques seen in many movies and can trace their roots to the Japanese aesthetic of Ma. 

Read More: The Simple Guide to Writing Animated Screenplays

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The movie opens with a preteen Jiro as he imagines taking to the skies in his own makeshift aircraft, soaring over the countryside and leaving all his cares, especially his annoying younger sister Kayo, far behind him. Informed that his extreme nearsightedness will prevent him from flying planes, the intrepid young man dedicates his life to designing and building them instead.

Awash in the lush, fluid animation style audiences have come to expect from Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, every frame of The Wind Rises is a painterly feast of light and color. One standout scene involves Jiro literally sharing a dream with Italian designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, one of Miyazaki’s real-life heroes, a cheery spectral presence who encourages the boy to push the limits of his creativity as the two walk side-by-side on the wings of an airborne bomber carrying travelers instead of soldiers.

Watch trailer here:

The rest of The Wind Rises follows Jiro on his career path from gifted neophyte to master designer, helped along by his loyal friend Honjo and his grumpy, floppy-haired supervisor Kurokawa. He even finds time for romance after reconnecting with Nahoko, the beautiful but sickly girl whose life he saved during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (another visual knockout accompanied by rumbling, almost guttural sound effects). Their time together, although largely a work of fiction, beautifully evokes the film’s emphasis on impermanence, as well as the moral insulation provided by true love and hard work.

So, what spurred Miyazaki, a committed pacifist, to tell the story of a man who spent years designing war machines? Apparently the filmmaker considers his subject an unlikely kindred spirit. Like Jiro, Miyazaki possesses a fiercely romantic fascination with flight, as evidenced by aeronautical epics such as Kiki’s Delivery Service, which featured a young witch delivering baked goods on her flying broom, and the delightful Porco Rosso, the saga of a World War I ace who is transfigured into an anthropomorphic pig.

The screenplay, adapted by Miyazaki from his own 2009 manga serial, goes out of its way to portray Jiro as essentially benign, a naïve dreamer who merely wanted to “make something beautiful,” even if that meant supplying the Japanese military with a plane that would ultimately spearhead the attack on Pearl Harbor and become the fighter of choice for thousands of kamikaze pilots. Regardless of historical accuracy, this choice allows The Wind Rises to function as Miyazaki’s anti-war treatise, exploring the paradoxical notion of creativity being used for inherently destructive ends.

Japanese conservatives have been lambasting Miyazaki for releasing the movie, especially at a time when the country seems poised to regain some of its clout as an national power, given Prime Minister (and USC alumnus) Shinzo Abe’s controversial plan to amend the constitution and convert Japan’s Self-Defense Forces into an active military (the country’s first since roughly 1947).

Miyazaki, for his part, has publically defended his right to criticize policy through art, saying The Wind Rises is meant to serve as a cautionary tale about the excesses of nationalism in general. This is supported by the appearance of a character named Castrop, a mysterious, vaguely supernatural German expatriate who warns Jiro about the dire consequences of Japan making deals with “Mr. Hitler” and his gang of “hoodlums.”

All in all, The Wind Rises represents an early yet dignified exit for one of the great pioneers of animation, a man who has every right to be called the Japanese equivalent of Walt Disney (though he’s arguably been more hands-on as an artist, contributing to nearly every frame of his earlier pictures and resisting the lure of digital effects until 1997). This film, along with the 10 other features Miyazaki made over the course of his long and varied career, serves as an eternal testament to a talent as playful and poignant as the wind itself.

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