Yuki’s Sun (1972) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Much as it’s hard to imagine consummate old man philosopher Hayao Miyazaki as a young animator looking (and at least on some level, failing) to prove his mettle, here we have it. This comes a year after Miyazaki worked as a co-director under his mentor and later Studio Ghibli co-creator Isao Takahata on the first Lupin the 3rd series, six years before his first sole directing credit on the television series Future Boy Conan, and seven years before his debut as a feature director with the Lupin movie The Castle of Cagliostro. This is often cited as animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s first short film, though it’s not really a proper short, but a sizzle reel for an unproduced television series based on a manga by Chiba Tetsuya. 

In fact, Miyazaki’s short film work is mostly confined exclusively to showings at the Studio Ghibli museum near Tokyo. You can watch a couple hand-recorded bootlegs of things like “Mei and the Kittenbus,” but at the risk of overstating things, you may as well endeavor to put a finger in God’s eye. I’d rather not see these works than watch a wobbly, stolen version marred by the backs of sweaty tourists heads. It would be wonderful to someday make the pilgrimage to see the films as intended (standing in a room filled with sweaty tourists). 

But “Yuki’s Sun” is the rare short available to us. I like this subtitling put up on YouTube over the more “official” one found in places like MUBI because of the note explaining that “‘Yuki’ is a common name for girls as well as the word for ‘snow’ in Japanese”. As for the failure of this pilot to get picked up for series, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise for Miyazaki. It has some definite resonances with his later work like a plucky young girl for a protagonist and an eye for motion demonstrated in the horses and Yuki’s run.  But it doesn’t immediately stand out as a story I’d love to see in full. Would he have gone on to give the world My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away if he’d found success a decade earlier and spent years adapting this manga (which I’ve never read but feel like I know almost the whole story from watching these four minutes)? Fortunately we never will find out.