Before long, Miyazaki fell in with Toei’s union, which had become an important cultural force. The team had “started thinking about things” for the first time, Nagasawa said. Union members read books, studied, held discussions and distributed news. This changed Toei’s atmosphere for the better. At a union film screening, Miyazaki saw the Soviet cartoon The Snow Queen and decided to stay an animator.

In 1964, Miyazaki became the union’s general secretary. While he’d been intrigued by Japan’s student protests in 1960, he hadn’t participated himself. This was new territory for him. “I was really at a loss then,” he said. “I had to take on responsibility. And I had to fight against the old guys who had interviewed me when I was a newly graduated greenhorn.”2

Still, he was making friends. One was Isao Takahata — vice president of the union during Miyazaki’s stint as general secretary.

Known as “Paku-san,” allegedly because of sounds he’d made while eating, Takahata was an imposing figure. He’d joined Toei in 1959, rising to the role of assistant director on The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963). Miyazaki described him as a “scary person” with plenty of enemies in management, but “very smart” and cool. Takahata remembered Miyazaki as “very young and naive.”3

They liked each other. Often, they talked about movies and animation rather than union work. Animator Yasuo Ōtsuka, a friend of Takahata’s, was another member of their circle.

Their politics were far to the left. Miyazaki was a Marxist with an affinity for Maoist China. (While he later drifted away from Marx and Mao, he’s stayed strongly progressive.) Takahata, for his part, was a Marxist for life. During the Vietnam War, Miyazaki said that he and his friends were rooting for the Viet Cong.

All of this energy, from the union’s politics to its rich culture, was headed somewhere. Following another blow-up between Toei and the union, Takahata embarked in 1965 on his biggest project yet. It was Horus: Prince of the Sun — a landmark that essentially created the blueprint for all feature-length anime to come. Here’s how Miyazaki described the project:

Around that time we were badmouthing Toei Animation’s work for not being with it and silly and such. It was just when Sanpei Shirato’s Kamui-den [a manga series with leftist politics] was starting, and we were filled with an intense desire to create something new and different. The times really had an impact on us. The effect of the Vietnam War was really powerful.

Horus was enabled by the “solidarity among the main staff that had built up during their union activism,” per the book Starting Point 1979–1996. It trained Takahata, Miyazaki and many more in filmmaking. But it would also spend years in development hell, flop at the box office and win Takahata even more enemies. Its importance was only apparent with time.

In the end, Toei’s union gave birth to the future of anime. The influence of its aesthetic ideas is clear in Horus — but not just there. Miyazaki said of union activism, “[It] was a terrific training ground for me because I had to face my own weaknesses on a daily basis.” The art he encountered, the skills he learned and the friends he made in the union set the course for his entire career.

Things wouldn’t stay so comfortable for long, however; due to the demands put upon the staff by the main trio and especially by Takahata, Heidi’s production quickly spiraled into hell for its staff. According to Yôko Gomi, although Heidi broke many artistic barriers, it also “opened a new and frightening door to a way of working that is not normal for human beings.”

(…)

She mentions that, by the middle of the show (probably around episode 22), the staff started regularly pulling all-nighters – something apparently unusual in anime production until then, outside of exceptional cases like Mushi Pro’s A Thousand and One Nights. By the latter stages of the show, episodes had to be entirely completed in just less than 2 weeks each. At some points, all free or not-so-free hands were put to work: production assistants had to help with cel painting so that the episodes could be delivered on time. 

However, they weren’t completely out of reach of the series’ demands and hellish pace. They, too, had to put up with what could only be called workplace harassment so that they could meet the show’s standard. The first element mentioned by Gomi is relatively harmless and logical: the completed first episode was shown to the entire staff before they started working so that they could get acquainted with the setting and the level that they were supposed to match. This was certainly unusual and must have put a lot of pressure on the animators who were still finishing their work on Rocky Chuck, but it made sense. However, things get notably darker when Gomi mentions that, even at Oh Pro, badly drawn key and in-between frames were hung up on the studio’s walls for everyone to see. In other words, failure wasn’t an option. “Those who got sick we thought just lacked determination,” Miyazaki said of the show’s working environment. “There was an abnormal tension in the air.”

It was obvious that Shigeto Takahashi had kept his promise to give Takahata as much rope as possible: now Takahata’s iron-fisted directorial style, with the full support of producer Junzô Nakajima, was unleashed with a vengeance as the entire staff underwent enormous suffering to meet his demands while keeping deadlines. The most remarkable thing is that, under such conditions, Heidi didn’t collapse. It certainly went through drops in animation quality and consistency, as we will see, but it still stood head and shoulders above the standard of most of 1974’s animation. This was perhaps a natural result of the “no failure allowed” mentality: the tension and pressure on the staff were so high that they had no choice but to deliver, and ended up doing so superbly. The fact that they were able to do so would only encourage producers and directors to push them further and raise their standards even more. Such a vicious cycle would go on to become the core not only of Studio Ghibli’s organization, but also of the entire anime industry’s exploitative practices. Of course, Heidi should not be held solely responsible for anime’s problems; but it should never be forgotten that this pioneering and revolutionary show was made in extremely difficult conditions, by a staff which never had to face such things before, under producers who were all too willing (or contractually obligated) to give Takahata the near-complete freedom and authority he needed to pull it off.

“Tobie mesurait un millimètre et demi, ce qui n'était pas grand pour son âge. Seul le bout de ses pieds dépassait du trou d'écorce. Il ne bougeait pas. La nuit l'avait recouvert comme un seau d'eau. Tobie regardait le ciel percé d'étoiles. Pas de nuit plus noire ou plus éclatante que celle qui s'étalait par flaques entre les énormes feuilles rousses. Quand la lune n'est pas là, les étoiles dansent. Voilà ce qu'il se disait. Il se répétait aussi : «S'il y a un ciel au paradis, il est moins profond, moins émouvant, oui, moins émouvant…» Tobie se laissait apaiser par tout cela. Allongé, il avait la tête posée sur la mousse. Il sentait le froid des larmes sur ses cheveux, près des oreilles. Tobie était dans un trou d'écorce noire, une jambe abîmée, des coupures à chaque épaule et les cheveux trempés de sang. Il avait les mains bouillies par le feu des épines, et ne sentait plus le reste de son petit corps endormi de douleur et de fatigue. Sa vie s'était arrêtée quelques heures plus tôt, et il se demandait ce qu'il faisait encore là. Il se rappelait qu'on lui disait toujours cela quand il fourrait son nez partout : «Encore là, Tobie !» Et aujourd'hui, il se le répétait à lui-même, tout bas : «Encore là ?» Mais il était bien vivant, conscient de son malheur plus grand que le ciel. Il fixait ce ciel comme on tient la main de ses parents dans la foule, à la fête des fleurs. Il se disait : «Si je ferme les yeux, je meurs.»”