I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women.

If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era.

Do everything by hand, even when using the computer.

I think we should stop using nuclear power plants because it's an old system that we can't control.

We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.

Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It's produced by humans who can't stand looking at other humans. And that's why the industry is full of otaku!

Children understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed world.