Hayao Miyazaki's directorial debut was a five-minute TV pilot.
Now it's available to watch legally in the West.
From the plot point, it's nothing special, but the trademark ghibliness is already showing.
Hayao Miyazaki has a long and fruitful career: he started in 1963 by working on the anime Wolf Boy Ken by Toei Animation, where he did in-between frames and key animation. But his first directorial debut — an animation that he fully directed himself — came almost 10 years later. It was Yuki's Sun (Yuki no Taiyou), a five-minute short movie that served as a pilot episode for a TV series that wasn't green-lit.
One of the first shoujo manga could've had a great anime adaptation
Previously it wasn't legally available to view in the West, but now it's available on Mubi, and Ghibli fans (and also general anime enthusiasts) can easily watch it. The TV series should've been an adaptation of the shoujo manga of the same name that follows the story of a 10-year-old girl adopted into a new family. While at first Iwabuchi family was pretty rich, a series of events left the family penniless, and Yuki, adopted into the family that has its own problems, now tries to live this new life, make new connections, and plans to discover her original family, with the wooden cross on her neck as her only connection.
The story is much deeper than it seems at first, focusing more on the dramatic aspect of the journey of the little girl lost in this world. But you won't see that in the pilot, as the pilot serves more like an animated summary of the whole series and narrates the whole story of the manga, laying out all the planned plot twists. Aside from the narrator, there are just some bits of dialogue from Yuki. Still, the plot is intense and filled to the brim with melodramatic clichés that weren't that cliché back in the 70s.
The birth of the style
Yet from the animation point of view, it's beautiful. Sure, the character's design is very 70s, but the animation itself feels too fluid and polished for something that was supposed to be just a pilot, and the backgrounds are made with enormous attention to detail. It was the dawn of animation, but Miyazaki's signature style was already palpable even in this short that served as an advertisement for the studio executives.
So as a stand-alone piece of animation, it doesn't have much significance, but it shows that Miyazaki's animation language has already started establishing itself way before the movies that we know and love him for were created.
A deep dive into Ghibli's history.
Summary:
Hayao Miyazaki's directorial debut was a five-minute TV pilot.
Now it's available to watch legally in the West.
From the plot point, it's nothing special, but the trademark ghibliness is already showing.
Hayao Miyazaki has a long and fruitful career: he started in 1963 by working on the anime Wolf Boy Ken by Toei Animation, where he did in-between frames and key animation. But his first directorial debut — an animation that he fully directed himself — came almost 10 years later. It was Yuki's Sun (Yuki no Taiyou), a five-minute short movie that served as a pilot episode for a TV series that wasn't green-lit.
One of the first shoujo manga could've had a great anime adaptation
Previously it wasn't legally available to view in the West, but now it's available on Mubi, and Ghibli fans (and also general anime enthusiasts) can easily watch it. The TV series should've been an adaptation of the shoujo manga of the same name that follows the story of a 10-year-old girl adopted into a new family. While at first Iwabuchi family was pretty rich, a series of events left the family penniless, and Yuki, adopted into the family that has its own problems, now tries to live this new life, make new connections, and plans to discover her original family, with the wooden cross on her neck as her only connection.
The story is much deeper than it seems at first, focusing more on the dramatic aspect of the journey of the little girl lost in this world. But you won't see that in the pilot, as the pilot serves more like an animated summary of the whole series and narrates the whole story of the manga, laying out all the planned plot twists. Aside from the narrator, there are just some bits of dialogue from Yuki. Still, the plot is intense and filled to the brim with melodramatic clichés that weren't that cliché back in the 70s.
The birth of the style
Yet from the animation point of view, it's beautiful. Sure, the character's design is very 70s, but the animation itself feels too fluid and polished for something that was supposed to be just a pilot, and the backgrounds are made with enormous attention to detail. It was the dawn of animation, but Miyazaki's signature style was already palpable even in this short that served as an advertisement for the studio executives.
So as a stand-alone piece of animation, it doesn't have much significance, but it shows that Miyazaki's animation language has already started establishing itself way before the movies that we know and love him for were created.
