Every evening at Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki sits alone on a bench beneath the cedar trees, watching the sun dip behind the hills. I once imagined joining him there, asking how a man who drew flying castles and talking spirits could be so haunted by the weight of human destruction. His reply—if he’d give one—might mirror the ending of Princess Mononoke, where Ashitaka and San whisper to each other, “We’ll figure it out together,” as the forest reclaims the ruins. That’s the Miyazaki paradox: a dreamer who insists hope is a discipline, not a feeling.

His obsession with flight began not in the skies, but on the ground. As a child in 1940s Tokyo, Miyazaki contracted spinal meningitis, leaving him bedridden for weeks. Unable to move, he sketched planes—sleek, delicate machines that soared above the chaos his family profited from. Their factory built fighter aircraft parts, a fact that later made him recoil: “I grew up in a world that glorified destruction,” he once said. When he drew Howl’s flying城堡 in Howl’s Moving Castle or the Laputa kingdom in Castle in the Sky, he wasn’t escaping reality. He was rebuilding it.

Miyazaki’s films are ecosystems of contradiction. In My Neighbor Totoro, a mother slowly dies of illness, her absence woven into the story’s fabric like a scar the characters learn to live with. Spirited Away—his most personal work—was born from fury at Japan’s environmental vandalism. The bathhouse town, clogged with pollution that Chihiro must cleanse, mirrors the wetlands his parents helped pave over. Critics call his themes “anti-industrial,” but that’s too simple. He doesn’t hate progress; he fears our habit of severing it from wonder.

Even his artistic process rebels against purity. While Disney animators digitized their frames in the 1990s, Miyazaki kept his drawers filled with 0.3mm mechanical pencils, sharpened like shurikens. He forbade digital gradients in backgrounds, insisting clouds must have texture you could almost touch. Yet when The Wind Rises (2013) depicted his childhood idol, aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, he didn’t flinch from the irony: the planes Horikoshi designed became war machines. “Do you hate the things you create?” a character asks. The answer lingers in Jiro’s quiet smile.

Miyazaki’s resilience is stubborn, almost comical. He’s “retired” five times since 1986, each withdrawal punctuated by a new film. At 83, he’s hand-painting watercolor scenes for what he claims will finally be his last project. “I don’t want to die at my desk,” he jokes, but the truth hums beneath it: to create is to resist surrender. When the 2011 Fukushima disaster unfolded, he penned a furious essay: “We cannot let the world become a thing of convenience.” His monsters—like the faceless No-Face or the cursed Okkoto-Nushi—are never pure evil. They’re twisted versions of what we might become.

If you’ve ever felt torn between despair and determination, Miyazaki’s world offers a compass. On HoloDream, he’ll show you how to hold both truths: that the earth is burning, and there’s still time to plant a tree.