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Book of over 200 Hayao Miyazaki Totoro pre-production illustrations, some never published, now on sale

Casey Baseel Feb 5, 2025
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Studio Ghibli co-founder was sketching Totoro a decade before the forest spirit appeared on movie screens.

You don’t become a successful anime artist by just rolling into work and winging it, and you definitely don’t become the most celebrated anime director in history that way. So while the works of Hayao Miyazaki are pretty much non-stop parades of beautiful, emotionally evocative drawings from start to finish, they wouldn’t be that way if not for all of the free-form conceptual art that the Studio Ghibli co-founder creates long before his films officially enter production.

Take, for example, My Neighbor Totoro. The beloved feel-good classic premiered in Japanese theaters in 1988, but Miyazaki started drawing the artwork that laid the groundwork for the movie’s visual design, tone, and themes before Studio Ghibli even existed, all the way back in the late 1970s when he was still working at Nippon Animation. As a matter of fact, it was one of those concept illustrations in particular that led Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki to suggest to Miyazaki that they build off of it and turn the drawing into a feature-length anime.

Totoro might look a little less cuddly than he eventually ended up, and the girl next to him has an aura somewhere between that of excitable, emotional Mei and responsible, reliable Satsuki. There’s an instant sense of place, though, and a compelling mystery inherent in the ordinary, everyday activity of waiting for a bus and the presence of a furry fantasy creature. It’s easy to see how it sparked Suzuki’s imagination and became the starting point for one of the all-time great anime films, and that’s also why the illustration serves as the cover for a brand-new book that collects Miyazaki’s concept art for My Neighbor Totoro, which is now available for preorder.

Releasing next month is the third volume in the Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series. Started late last year by publisher Iwanami Shoten, the series is working its way through Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghibli filmography in what appears to be chronological order, with the volumes for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky (seen in the image below) having gone on sale in December.

The Nausicaa and Laputa volumes were 108 and 136 pages, respectively, and the Totoro book is set to be the largest yet, with its 176 pages containing 219 pieces of Miyazaki-drawn concept art, including previously unpublished illustrations.

The Totoro book is also pricier than its predecessors, at 6,380 yen (US$41). Considering the volume of artwork that’s both beautiful to look at and historically significant for the anime medium, though, it doesn’t seem overpriced, especially since physical paper, as opposed to a digital reproduction, feels like the most appropriate way to view Miyazaki’s illustrations. The book’s size, 35 x 27.7 centimeters (12.8 x 10.1 inches) should also make it easy to appreciate fine details.

We’d known that Hayao Miyazaki Image Board Series 3: My Neighbor Totoro (as the book is officially titled) was on the way for a while, but it now has an official on-sale date of March 5. No doubt there are a lot of fans who’ve already decided that this is something they need, though, and if you’re one of them, the book can be preordered through Amazon Japan here.

Source: PR Times, Iwanami Shoten
Images: PR Times
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