The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

Sketches that set the tone

Animation Obsessive has turned a bright spotlight on Hayao Miyazaki’s image boards — the loose, impulsive concept art that helped shape decades of Japanese animation. It has been reported that audiences sat mostly quiet after The Boy and the Heron in 2023, stunned by a director who keeps reinventing himself; that sense of reinvention, the newsletter argues, is visible in the way Miyazaki has never stopped sketching. Image boards, as Miyazaki described them, are not storyboards but mood pieces — quick ideas meant to suggest atmosphere, not lock down continuity.

From rough jabs to purposeful looseness

Miyazaki began making these boards at Toei in the 1960s, working on projects like Horus: Prince of the Sun and later Animal Treasure Island and Pippi Longstocking. What looked like frenzied jabs on cheap paper was strategic: rough, fast, cinematic. It has been reported that he drew larger at first, then made the pieces smaller and quicker to keep the process exploratory rather than precious. Colleagues remember the energy — allegedly nobody’s line work on those early projects matched Miyazaki’s eye for movement and mise-en-scène.

Why it matters

Why care about a pile of sketches? Because they’re the secret sauce behind creative decisions — stuck to studio walls, shared freely, a common language for animators to argue with, riff on, or fall in love with. These image boards are a throughline from youthful experiments to an octogenarian’s late masterpieces: a reminder that big ideas often arrive on the back of small, messy drawings. Want to understand Miyazaki’s films? Start with the scribbles.

Sources: animationobsessive.substack.com, Hacker News