Quick Summary: The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a light, good-natured biopic about renowned film-maker Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli colleagues. Despite the limitations of a less than two hour running time, the film shows surprising insight into its subjects.

Title: The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (Yume to kyoki no ohkoku)

Release: 2013

Director: Mami Sunada

Featuring:

Hayao Miyazaki

Isao Takahata

Toshio Suzuki

With 20 animated feature-length films to its credit, Studio Ghibli is one of the best-known of all Japanese animation companies. As such, the studio and its most prominent member, Hayao Miyazaki, make interesting subjects for Mami Sunada's light, kind-hearted documentary Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. Filmed during the making of 2013's The Wind Rises, this biopic introduces us not only to the everyday working life of Hayao Miyazaki, but also allows us into the lives of friendly rival Isao Takahata, producer Toshio Suzuki, and numerous other Studio Ghibli staffers, from animators to lawyers.

Although rather short, at only 118 minutes, the film does manage to show some of the inner workings of the animation studio. Despite the presence of plenty of up-to-date equipment, a surprising amount of work at Studio Ghibli is still done by hand. Backgrounds are hand-painted, key frames are hand-drawn, and Miyazaki carefully uses an old analogue stopwatch to time the shots he imagines in his head.

The film presents Miyazaki as a kindly - though sometimes temperamental - man with a fondness for animals, strong pacifist and environmentalist leanings, and a yearning to make meaningful, yet enjoyable, films. Miyazaki's pacifist beliefs become especially interesting in connection with the movie under production at the time of filming; The Wind Rises is about Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the zero fighter plane. Miyazaki talks at length about his desire to make a fundamentally anti-war film, while still showing the planes themselves as the wonderful and beautiful creations that they are.

To further emphasize the personal nature of the project, Sunada has made an interesting choice. She decided to interleave images from the then-in-progress The Wind Rises with photographs from Miyazaki's own childhood during the Second World War. Miyazaki says that his designs for the character of Jiro are entirely based on the real Jiro Horikoshi, but one look at a photograph of Miyazaki's father reveals that this is not entirely the case. The animated Jiro's glasses, hairstyle, clothing – even the way he stands – are more reminiscent of Miyazaki's father than of the real Jiro Horikoshi. It just takes a thoughtful documentary film-maker like Sunada to point out these connections, connections that even Miyazaki himself may not consciously realise.