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Apr 30, 2019 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

In 2013, Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki – the filmmaker behind such masterpieces as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away – announced his retirement at the age of 73. The reason he gave was old age, and that the level of concentration needed to hand-draw a feature film was becoming too much for him to go through. One unspoken truth was that his breed was on its way out the door: the laborious process of cell animation has been mostly replaced by CGI, which can achieve a similar effect in only a fraction of the time.

Never-Ending Man is Japanese television documentary which tracks Miyazaki in the years following his retirement. The movie opens with a haunting, heartbreaking tour of the empty Ghibli studios and continues into the animator’s home, where a cantankerous, confrontational Miyazaki repeatedly insists that his working years are behind him. The crew visits again and again as time goes on, sometimes accompanied by Miyazaki’s longtime friend and collaborator, Toshio Suzuki, one of the few figures comfortable enough with the old master to call his bluffs. Eventually the artist’s drive to create gets the best of him, and Miyazaki skeptically accepts an invitation to meet with a team of young CGI animators who may be able to help him bring a new vision to the screen.

The documentary is very much a tale of traditionalist versus trailblazers. When an invigorated Miyazaki proposes gathering a team of young animators to hand-draw a new film, he’s deflated by Suzuki frankly explaining to him that young cell animators no longer exist. For much of the film, Miyazaki plays the part of a stubborn old man, accepting that his way of doing things has reached the point of extinction but seemingly unwilling to accept what’s come in its wake. This is most starkly demonstrated when members of his team show him an experimental animation rendered with the help of artificial intelligence; Miyazaki reacts with genuine disgust, going so far to call the tech demo “an insult to life” and nearly bringing one of his young animators to tears. Miyazaki does eventually come around to new ideas with time, as evidenced with his CGI-aided short film Boro the Caterpillar, but the acceptance of change doesn’t come without significant clawing and gnashing.

Of course, Never-Ending Man is also an intimate look into the creative process of the medium’s most brilliant artist. Miyazaki understands movement and storytelling in the same way that Da Vinci or Vermeer understood anatomy and lighting; watching him work and solve problems is utterly fascinating. Even when it seems he’s being unnecessarily harsh with an underling, it’s hard to argue with his genius. We’ll likely never see another animator of his talent, and this behind-the-scenes study of the man at work is one of the best we’ve been given, at least in the West. Included on the disc are the theatrical trailer and a shorter, English-language cut which features alternate footage.

(www.shoutfactory.com/product/never-ending-man-hayao-miyazaki)