I figure this is an important thing to clear up

Maddy linked to an article by Hooded Utilitarian which said that Miyazaki claimed that a sign of the declining anime industry or something.

I found this weird, because Miyazaki has a huge reputation as a feminist and his work supports that- of course, those who claim to be feminists can fail pretty hard, but Miyazaki’s work specifically praises and lauds working women so for him to be upset about women getting jobs seemed unbelievable. Japanese culture can be very old-fashioned about women and work, but Miyazaki seemed far more progressive than that. Ghibli also has a lot of female animators, though admittedly I don’t think any of them have ever directed.

The other odd thing was the use of Twitter- even some minimal research on Miyazaki lets it be known that he hates modern technology with the fire of a thousand suns, so I doubted he would have a Twitter. A little research showed that yup, this was a bot. It reproduces bits of Miyazaki’s interviews (out of context) possibly in a very mixed up way. So the lady thinking she was having a conversation with Miyazaki definitely didn’t.

What’s more, through research, the ONLY interview quote I could find that this could have possibly been connected to and that someone commented it was probably connected to was an interview at Berkeley in 2009

Kelts noted that Chihiro is one of many strong, independent, curious, ambitious young female protagonists in Miyazaki’s films. Miyazaki offered that at Studio Ghibli they are now in the process of training new animators. In April earlier this year the studio hired 22 new animators and, of those, only four are men. Since there are so many strong women now, Miyazaki might have to start making films about men.

I watched the interview and there was a female translator present to translate for him perfectly- and Miyazaki laughed after saying this, and then the (male) interviewer said “Yeah, you need to give us more confidence now!” So it was simply Miyazaki being playful about the rise of women in the anime industry and his own love of female protagonists.

If Miyazaki had actually said something like what was translated from twitter in an interview, I believe there would have been a MUCH bigger to-do about it in Western fandom. All the reactions I can find on Google stem from the HU article, which has already been proven to be coming from an unreliable source.

So that’s some pretty shoddy research, HU. You should at least know you’re taking to a bot. Also the title of the article kinda skeeves me out- “bamboo curtain”? Are you shitting me?

I’ve never been a huge fan of that site :/- there’s an occasional good article but sometimes they just come out with weird shit.