Hayao Miyazaki

Co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 with longtime collaborator Isao Takahata, following the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), adapted from his own manga. The studio became one of the most internationally acclaimed animation houses in the world, with Miyazaki directing or co-writing most of its landmark films over the following four decades.

Directed Spirited Away (2001), which became Japan's highest-grossing film at the time of release and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and The Boy and the Heron (2023), which won the same award more than two decades later — an unusually long span between two Academy Award-winning films by the same director.

Princess Mononoke (1997) became the first animated film to win the Japan Academy Film Prize for Picture of the Year and, at a budget of ¥2.35 billion, was the most expensive Japanese animated film made up to that time; it went on to become Japan's highest-grossing domestic film for several months after release.

In 1964, as a young animator at Toei Doga, became chief secretary of the studio's labor union, forming a lifelong friendship and creative partnership with the union's vice-chairman, Isao Takahata, with whom he would later found Studio Ghibli.

Announced his retirement from feature filmmaking in January 1998, but returned within days to direct Spirited Away after the sudden death, on January 21, 1998, of Yoshifumi Kondō, the director who had been slated to succeed him — one of several announced-then-reversed retirements across his career, the last reversed in 2016 to make The Boy and the Heron (2023).