#3. Meditating with Hayao Miyazaki

I found out about Hayao Miyazaki when I was living in New York, in 2002.  By then I had two Japanese flatmates, and he was getting popular everywhere because of his Spirited Away, which was soon to become a fever and to be awarded prizes in the United States and the golden bear in the Berlin Festival.  At that point I didn't know any of that, and the three of us used to watch his films together, in Japanese, Izumi and Mariko making their best to translate them into English for me...  It was from them, my flatmates, that I learnt that Hayao Miyazaki is worshiped as some sort of deity in Japan, and that one of his main distinctive artistic features lies in the fact that he uses Shintoist elements in his movies: nature is usually the main character, placed between the material and the spiritual levels.  I took this week to watch most of his stuff, which I found available at a film store nearby.  This is one of my favorites: