Mamoru Hosoda

Life and career

Hosoda was born in Kamiichi, Nakaniikawa District, Toyama, Japan. His father worked as a railway engineer, and his mother was a tailor. In the sixth grade, during 1979, he was strongly influenced by several animation works and set his sights on a career related to anime. Those works were Isao Takahata's Anne of Green Gables, Osamu Dezaki's Aim for the Ace! The Movie, Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam, Rintaro's Galaxy Express 999 The Movie and Hayao Miyazaki's Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. Hosoda described the concentration of works in that year as like a grand cross of planets lining up on the ecliptic. He had already analyzed the directing methods and screen compositions of Miyazaki and Rintaro in a collection of essays written by elementary school graduates. He cited Takahata's Anne of Green Gables as the most influential anime, noting that Takahata, as a director who does not draw, taught him that drawing is not the only way to dominate a film. In junior high school, he saw people his age making animation on NHK Educational TV's independent animation specials and started making paper animation using the anime magazine Animage as a reference. As a first-year high school student, he applied for the open call for animators for the Toei Dōga-produced film Shōnen Kenya (1984) and was shortlisted but withdrew because of mid-term exams. He majored in oil painting at the Kanazawa College of Art in Ishikawa Prefecture, joined the film club, and produced live-action films, somewhat distancing himself from animation. He produced nearly 50 video works, including two fiction films submitted to the Pia Film Festival and the Image Forum Festival, as well as other video art works. In 1989, he saw an article in Animage recruiting trainees for the production of Studio Ghibli's Only Yesterday and took a recruitment test. He did not pass the exam but received a letter from Hayao Miyazaki saying he had decided not to hire someone like Hosoda because he thought it would diminish his talent.