The imagination is a place where reality is found more than in the news. Usually, this is enough to convince you, but, in Mijazaki’s cinematographic imagination you will find much, much more. It is in the virtue of poetry that contains more than can be said in words, and it is this same virtue that is found in the animated film of one the most important animators and directors of our present times. He is capable of moving us from Heidi to the Japanese reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes, from science fiction to the modernization of the fairy-tale model. He has created monsters and heroes, little girls in search of their maturity, and panic-spirits laden with unknown wisdom. All this with a very deep lightness, a maniacal search for perfection, and always trying to whisper, a breath of life and of minimal magnitude of the things and events of nature. In so doing, without ever taking for granted that a bad guy had such a divine stigma, and that he could never mend his ways. It searches among the folds of the psychology of its protagonists for those doubts and motivations that make them a paradigm of the will to live. And, their lives are in fact imprinting themselves in our innermost worlds.
