“Even in the middle of hatred and killings, there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist.”
— Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke project proposal (1995)
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most celebrated storytellers in cinema history. As the co-founder of Studio Ghibli and the mind behind films like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, he has spent decades crafting worlds that hold darkness and wonder in careful balance. His words carry the weight of someone who has thought deeply about what stories are actually for.
This quote comes from his 1995 project proposal for Princess Mononoke, a film he was designing to confront war, environmental destruction, and the brutal collision of human ambition with the natural world. It was not going to be a comfortable film. Miyazaki knew that, and he wanted his team to know it too. So before a single frame was drawn, he wrote down what he believed the whole effort was reaching toward.
What he described is not optimism in the easy sense. He does not say the hatred disappears, or that the killings are justified by beauty. He says that beauty exists alongside them, stubbornly, quietly. A meeting between two people. A glimpse of something worth seeing. These small things do not cancel out the suffering, but they make continued living feel possible.
For an animator who builds entire worlds from imagination, this is also a kind of artistic philosophy. Every frame is a choice about what deserves to exist on screen. Miyazaki chose, again and again, to make room for grace even inside chaos. This quote is simply him saying that out loud.
