Hayao Miyazaki

Born: 5 January 1941
Where: Tokyo, Japan

Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki is known by cartoon-makers across the globe as Japan's Walt Disney.

Although he loathes the title, it seems ironic that his name may become known in the West courtesy of the Magic Kingdom, because they are distributing his titles.

Miyazaki first came to the attention of a broader audience when he won an Academy Award for the feature-length Spirited Away.

He has been a household name in his native Japan for decades thanks to films like The Castle of Cagliostro, Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke.

He started his career in 1963 as an animator at the studio Toei Douga, and was subsequently involved in many early classics of Japanese animation.

In 1971, he moved to A Pro with Isao Takahata, then to Nippon Animation in 1973, where he worked on the World Masterpiece Theatre TV animation series for the next five years.

In 1978, he directed his first TV series Conan, The Boy in Future and then moved to Tokyo Movie Shinsha in 1979 to direct his first movie, the classic Castle of Cagliostro.

In 1984, he released Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds, based on the manga (comic) of the same title he had started two years before.

The success of the film led to the establishment of a new animation studio, Studio Ghibli, at which Miyazaki has since directed, written, and produced is recent work.

All of these films enjoyed critical and box office successes with Princess Mononoke landing the Japan Academy Award for Best Film and scoring as the highest-grossing domestic film in Japan's history.

A keen ecologist, most of his films have an environmental theme and usually feature two children as their protagonists entering a strange or forbidding world - ie the floating islands in Castles in the Sky.

All these components came together for Spirited Away, which won an Oscar for best animated feature in 2003.