Look, half the internet acts like Miyazaki’s some ancient sage who speaks for all artists just because he saw that god-awful crawling-zombie AI demo back in 2016 and said it was an insult to life itself. Fair enough, the thing was disgusting, but the guy barely touches the internet, Ghibli tried Twitter for one year and noped out like it kicked their dog, and he’s spent decades running his studio like a guy who thinks electricity is suspicious. He’s exiled people for using tablets, canned his own kid, and throws tantrums over digital paint while Disney’s in the back room teaching computers to write scripts.
Then you’ve got Kyoto Animation on the other side of the planet, paying real salaries, running an in-house school, giving maternity leave, bringing in therapy dogs after someone burned the place down and killed thirty-six of them, and still putting out absolute bangers without crunching anyone to death. That’s what an actual healthy studio looks like.
I’m not saying Miyazaki’s movies don’t hit harder than anything else out there (they do), but let’s stop treating one old man’s trauma from a single creepy demo like it’s the final word on tools forever. The future isn’t grandpas yelling at crayons; it’s the places that figure out how to make great art without treating people like garbage. He can keep his pencils. The rest of us will keep moving.