Leadership Quote by Hayao Miyazaki

Miyazaki isn’t downplaying himself so much as rejecting a whole modern myth about creative power: that the director is a sleek “executive” who steers ideas from a distance while others do the messy labor. By calling himself a “foreman” in an “animation cinema factory,” he anchors authorship in production, not prestige. The vocabulary is pointedly unglamorous. “Factory” evokes repetition, deadlines, aching wrists, and the unromantic truth that animation is made frame by frame by human hands. He’s telling you his films aren’t miracles; they’re built.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to corporate animation culture, where management often means optimizing output and minimizing friction. Miyazaki flips that hierarchy: leadership isn’t spreadsheets and approvals, it’s being close enough to the work to argue over a gesture, a timing, the weight of a step. “Boss of a team of craftsmen” is a moral claim. Craft implies apprenticeship, standards, pride, and a shared language of detail. It also implies responsibility: if you’re the foreman, you don’t get to outsource failure.

Context matters: Studio Ghibli’s identity has long been tied to hand-drawn texture and labor-intensive care at a time when the industry’s center of gravity has moved toward pipelines, scalability, and brand management. Miyazaki’s phrasing defends a culture where artistry is inseparable from process, and where the director’s authority is earned by proximity to the line, not distance from it. That “spirit” is his real manifesto: make leadership tactile, collective, and accountable.