In trying to establish a look for his fantastical tale of lost floating cities, Miyazaki took his team of animators to a small mining town in South Wales, whose architecture would inspire the huddled terrace houses of Pazu’s hometown. He’d...

The insanely picturesque, Franco-Germanic architecture of Colmar, Alsace, was a key visual touchstone in Miyazaki’s tale of a young lady who hooks up with a handsome young wizard in order to lift a curse, with the carved renaissance...

For his free-spirited tale of a trainee witch, Miyazaki needed a location every bit as whimsical as his teenaged heroine. Since the film was set in a fictional country in northern Europe, he turned for inspiration to Gotland, a Swedish...

Miyazaki set his fourth feature film in the ‘satoyama’ – vivid-green patches of farmland flanked by wooded hills – which lie just a short trip from his home in Tokorozawa, Japan. The satoyama occupy a place of special importance in the...

Not a visual reference per se, but Miyazaki was moved to write Nausicaa by the plight of Minamata, the Kyushu factory town whose coastal waters were poisoned with mercury during the 50s and 60s, making many of its residents seriously ill....

Ponyo was conceived after a trip to the Seto Inland Sea in Japan left Miyazaki despondent about humankind’s disregard for the marine environment. “I saw how people have polluted the sea, and came back home angry,” he told Comic-Con in...

Miyazaki’s adventure story about a strangely piggy-looking ex-WWI fighter pilot is set on Croatia’s spectacular Adriatic coast, though the outbreak of war during production prompted the filmmakers to omit explicit references to the fact...

While researching his eco-minded masterpiece Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki spent three days with his team in Yakushima, a subtropical island off the south coast of Japan famous for its loggerhead turtles, ancient cedars and red bottomed...

Miyazaki had wanted to make a movie set around a sentō (communal bathhouse) since visiting them as a child, but for the fantastical setting of Spirited Away, he needed something a little bit larger than life, and he found it in the Amei...