Four years in the making, the new Panorama Box series shows Miyazaki’s art is “evolving”.

Hayao Miyazaki is known for being a brilliant illustrator and director, and part of what makes him so skilled is his long-held fascination with how we perceive images. At the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, for example, there’s a whole room dedicated to unusual contraptions that bridge the gap between static and moving art, including a giant zoetrope that shows how movement and strobe lights can turn a model into a movie.

Now, the 85-year-old director is continuing his exploration beyond the page and screen with a brand new series of works. Announced at a press conference at Studio Ghibli’s Studio 1 in Tokyo on 17 March, the new series is said to be Miyazaki’s first since he finished work on the Oscar award-winning 2023 movie The Boy and the Heron, and it’s been nearly four years in the making, with the director starting on it in June 2022.

Despite being the creator, the famously reclusive Miyazaki was not in attendance at the press conference, with Miyazaki’s son Goro and Studio Ghibli co-founder and producer Toshio Suzuki facing the media instead. They both spoke enthusiastically about the new series of works, which the older Miyazaki has dubbed the “Panorama Box“.

▼ The Ghibli Museum shared a sneak peek at the special boxes.

Goro says that although this term was coined by Miyazaki, it’s generally known as an “art box“, and it’s been around in some shape or form since the 16th Century. True to its name, Miyazaki’s picture box contains a panorama that gives you a glimpse into a contained world like a diorama, but unlike other boxes, where scenes are set out like a simple stage, Miyazaki’s creation makes extensive use of vertical compositions. This means that when you look inside the box, your eyes tend to move vertically instead of horizontally as you take in the scene, mimicking the way a camera might pan up or down in an anime, which Goro says is very “Miyazaki-esque“.

When viewed from a distance, the art inside the box appears flat, but step closer and you’ll discover a landscape with depth, as the background and characters are drawn separately and arranged in multiple layers. In total, Miyazaki has created 31 different panorama boxes, all containing numerous artworks, many of which are completely original, and characters from famous Ghibli movies like Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Boy and the Heron, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away.

▼ This news clip shows some of Miyazaki’s new Panorama Boxes.

Goro says his father’s love for the panorama box likely stems from his childhood, when he used to play with toys made from caramel candy boxes. According to Suzuki, Miyazaki once spent a long time studying Salvador Dalí’s “The Little Theater”, an art box they saw at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York) when they were there to promote Princess Mononoke many years ago. Dalí’s art box consists of 11 paintings on glass with a light source, and was itself an attempted recreation of an “optical theatre” the artist had seen in a box when he was a child.

Though Miyazaki’s Panorama Box is designed to enjoyed by adults and children alike, Goro says the director received a lot of joy from watching children’s reactions to the boxes when they were shown to them ahead of the press conference. Miyazaki reportedly told him, “The Ghibli for children is back“, before shaking his hand.

Handshakes from Miyazaki appear to be the ultimate form of approval, as Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno received one himself when he visited the director in his Tokyo atelier the other day. When Anno shared news of his visit online through his production company’s Twitter account last week, he mentioned that Miyazaki was drawing “pictures” that he likes, and after the press conference Anno revealed that the art for the panorama boxes were in fact those “pictures”. Having seen them in person, Anno says that the “sheer wonder” of these three-dimensional artworks is hard to convey through flat photos so he wholeheartedly recommends seeing them in person when the Panorama Box exhibition opens on 8 July at the Grand Warehouse at Ghibli Park in Aichi Prefecture.

▼ Ghibli Park also expressed excitement for the upcoming event with a tweet showing the soon-to-be-seen Panorama Boxes.

The Panorama Boxes were always designed to be shown at Ghibli Park, with Hayao Miyazaki himself offering to make them for an exhibition. Goro says children will be excited to stand on their tiptoes to peer into the mesmerising worlds when they go on display, and he encourages adults to squat down to a child’s level when viewing the boxes to get the most enjoyment out of them.

As for Goro’s father, he shows no signs of laying down his paintbrushes, with Suzuki saying he’s incredibly energetic and still wants to make movies. Though Suzuki says he doesn’t have any answers as to whether or not there will ever be another Hayao Miyazaki movie, he does say that when he looks at the Panorama Box, he can see that the power of Miyazaki’s images hasn’t diminished – in fact, he’s “evolving”. According to Suzuki, Miyazaki appears to be “trying to get ahead of Goro” at Ghibli Park, which he tasked Goro with creating. Suzuki goes so far as to say it’s his “driving force” as the older Miyazaki is “the kind of person who won’t lose to anyone and will create something interesting”.

Now that we think about it, these new panorama boxes do a great job of creating 3-D Ghibli worlds without the use of CG, an animation style that Miyazaki has long avoided, despite his son’s foray into that world with Earwig and the Witch. So if competition with his son, or a desire to continue teaching him and expanding his horizons, gives us more creative works like this, then let that driving force live on.

Sources: Aichi Prefectural Government, Ghibli Park, Mainichi Shimbun, FNN, NTV
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