April 7, 2026
Sketches, Screeches, and Ghibli Feels
The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki
Fans gasp over rare sketches, mourn the Pippi that never was
TLDR: A newsletter dropped rare concept sketches—Miyazaki’s image boards—from early projects and an unmade Pippi, revealing how his ideas took shape. Fans swooned over the magic, debated his “difficult” side, geeked out over a Future Boy Conan warship, and collectively mourned the Pippi that never happened.
Animation Obsessive just unveiled rare early “image boards” — loose idea sketches — from Hayao Miyazaki’s career, and the comments went full shrine mode. Fans are dazzled by the rough, lively drawings behind films like Horus and Animal Treasure Island, plus a heartbreaking peek at the unmade Pippi Longstocking. One commenter asked how these ultra-rare scans were found, and the thread turned into a mini-heist fantasy: did someone crack open a secret Ghibli vault? Meanwhile, another viewer waved the NHK documentary "10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki" like a receipt, noting his “sometimes difficult character.” Cue a spicy split: is Miyazaki the gentle grandpa of Totoro or the prickly perfectionist genius? Both camps showed up, passionately. The pure awe brigade lit up too — one fan simply called the drawings “magic” and declared the man one of a kind. Nostalgia nerds had their big “aha!” moment when someone ID’d a “giant flying wing warship” as a Future Boy Conan special, sending aviation fans into a victory lap. Jokes flew about “proto-Totoro sightings” and “image board archaeology” degrees, but the loudest chorus was grief for the Miyazaki x Astrid Lindgren collab that never happened. Bottom line: seeing the seeds of these worlds made everyone feel the wonder — and the what-ifs — all over again.
Key Points
- •Hayao Miyazaki uses ‘image boards’ as concept art to shape a project’s mood and direction, distinct from storyboards.
- •He began creating image boards at Toei Doga, notably during Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968) directed by Isao Takahata.
- •At Toei, image boards were posted on studio walls to align the team and invite feedback.
- •Miyazaki’s early boards were quickly drawn in pencil with a single color wash, evolving into a looser, purposeful style.
- •By 1971 he contributed concept art to Animal Treasure Island and left Toei to work on Takahata’s unmade Pippi Longstocking, continuing prolific image board work through the 1970s.