Hayao Miyazaki Trivia
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60 free Hayao Miyazaki trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Hayao Miyazaki has announced his retirement more than once and never quite meant it. This quiz follows the man rather than just the studio: the wartime childhood in a family that made fighter-plane parts, the sickly boy who could draw tanks but not people, the union organiser at Toei who met Isao Takahata, the trips to Sweden, Switzerland and Wales, and the Lupin III caper that became his first feature. From there it runs through the Nausicaä manga, the founding of Studio Ghibli, the Totoro merchandise that saved the company, Princess Mononoke's box-office records, the Oscar he boycotted for Spirited Away and the one he was too old to collect for The Boy and the Heron. There are questions on his family (his animator wife, his son Goro, the niece behind Mei), on his opinions (anime, AI, Iraq), on Joe Hisaishi and Toshio Suzuki, and on the awards from Venice, Berlin, the Academy and the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation. Easy questions suit anyone who has seen a Ghibli film; the expert tier asks about Citroëns, pen names and a princess's wedding dress. If you want the studio's other directors and films, try our Studio Ghibli quiz too. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Miyazaki and his films, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which film was Studio Ghibli's first release?
Castle in the Sky
Castle in the Sky reached cinemas in 1986 and disappointed at the box office; only re-releases and home video later turned the new studio's debut into a success.
Q 02In which city was Hayao Miyazaki born in January 1941?
Tokyo
Tokyo was home only briefly: the family evacuated north to Utsunomiya during the war, and Miyazaki was nine before they moved back to the capital.
Q 03Miyazaki's father ran a family firm that manufactured what during World War II?
Rudders for fighter planes
Rudders for fighter planes were the trade of Miyazaki Airplane, his uncle's firm, which his father directed; the war work kept the family well off, and aircraft fill his films.
Q 04The teenage Miyazaki sneaked out to see Japan's first colour animated feature instead of doing what?
Studying for exams
Studying for exams lost out to The White Snake Enchantress (1958), which moved him so deeply that he gave up clever, fashionable manga for more sincere stories.
Q 05Which subject did Miyazaki, later a trade-union leader at his first studio, study at Gakushuin University?
Political science and economics
Political science and economics were his degree subjects, but he spent his student years in a children's literature research club, reading and discussing fantasy fiction.
Q 06Which studio hired the young Miyazaki in 1963, launching his career in animation?
Toei Animation
Toei Animation soon found its rookie leading a labour dispute: he became chief secretary of the studio's union and pressed for better treatment of animators.
Q 07In Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, what is the name of the young witch's talking black cat?
Jiji
Jiji talks only through Kiki's magic, so when her powers falter she can no longer understand him, and he takes up with Lily, the white cat next door.
Q 08Miyazaki's wife, Akemi Ōta, held which job at the studio where the two met in 1964?
Inbetween animator
Inbetween animator Akemi Ōta married him on the understanding that both would keep working, but in 1972 she gave up her career to raise their two sons.
Q 09Miyazaki's directorial debut came co-directing which 1971-72 television series with Takahata?
Lupin the Third Part I
Lupin the Third Part I was losing viewers with its adult tone, so its first director was replaced and the pair were told to play up the humour; it was still cancelled, then prized in reruns.
Q 10Miyazaki flew to Sweden in 1971 hoping to win the rights to animate which children's books?
Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking's author, Astrid Lindgren, never gave her permission, so the team poured its ideas into the Panda! Go, Panda! shorts, whose pigtailed heroine was modelled on Pippi.
Q 11Miyazaki made a 1973 research trip abroad for which television series based on a classic children's novel?
Heidi, Girl of the Alps
Heidi, Girl of the Alps sent him and Takahata to Switzerland to sketch real villages and pastures, because the team wanted the series to set a new standard for television animation.
Q 12Which 1978 series, set after a war that has wrecked the world, was the first Miyazaki directed on his own?
Future Boy Conan
Future Boy Conan came from Alexander Key's novel The Incredible Tide, but Miyazaki took the job only on condition that he could rewrite its pessimistic story into a hopeful one for children.
Q 13What was Miyazaki's first feature film, released in December 1979?
Q 21Miyazaki took the name Ghibli, a word for a hot desert wind, from the Italian nickname of what?
A Caproni aircraft
A Caproni aircraft, the Ca.309 desert scout, carried the nickname Ghibli; the plane-loving Miyazaki chose it in the hope that his studio would blow a new wind through Japanese animation.
Q 22After the US release Warriors of the Wind mangled Nausicaä, Studio Ghibli imposed which rule on foreign versions of its films?
No cuts
No cuts has been the studio's condition for foreign releases ever since: the American edit had removed scenes that carried the heroine's character and the film's environmental message.
Q 23Miyazaki sketched the mining villages of which country while researching Castle in the Sky?
Wales
The Castle of Cagliostro
The Castle of Cagliostro was no hit in 1979, but its reputation grew until readers of Animage magazine voted it the best anime ever made.
Q 14In Spirited Away, what does the witch Yubaba take from Chihiro to bind her to the bathhouse?
Her name
Her name is cut down to Sen when she signs Yubaba's contract, and Haku warns that if she forgets the real one, as he forgot his, she will never leave the spirit world.
Q 15Legal trouble with which author's estate halted Miyazaki's early-1980s series about a canine detective after six episodes?
Arthur Conan Doyle's
Arthur Conan Doyle's estate kept the show on hold so long that Miyazaki had moved on by the time the dispute was settled; another director finished the series, his last work for television.
Q 16In Howl's Moving Castle, the Witch of the Waste's curse turns the young hatmaker Sophie into what?
An old woman
An old woman of ninety, and the curse stops her telling anyone, so she walks out of the hat shop to find a cure and talks her way into the wizard's castle as its cleaner.
Q 17The heroine Nausicaä was partly inspired by a character from which ancient work?
Homer's Odyssey
Homer's Odyssey has a princess Nausicaa who helps Odysseus; Miyazaki met her in a handbook of Greek myths and liked that retelling better than Homer's own.
Q 18Which real environmental disaster inspired the toxic world of Miyazaki's Nausicaä film?
Mercury poisoning of Minamata Bay
Mercury poisoning of Minamata Bay caught his imagination less for the damage than for what followed: nature adapting and thriving in a poisoned place, the idea behind the film's toxic jungle.
Q 19Which composer, hired for Nausicaä in 1984, has scored every one of Miyazaki's feature films since?
Joe Hisaishi
Joe Hisaishi was an experimental minimalist when he was asked for an 'image album' of music inspired by the manga; it won him the film, and every Miyazaki feature since.
Q 20Miyazaki named his copyright company Nibariki after the nickname of which little French car that he drove?
Citroën 2CV
Citroën 2CV: its French nickname, deux chevaux, means 'two horses', and Nibariki is Japanese for 'two-horse power'. It was his first car, and he put one in his first feature's car chase.
Wales: he arrived during the 1984 miners' strike and admired how the men battled to save their way of life, a fight he poured into the film's mining town.
Q 24The floating island in Castle in the Sky is borrowed from which classic novel?
Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver's Travels gave the film its flying island of Laputa, but Disney's English release dropped the name from the title because 'la puta' is a vulgar phrase in Spanish.
Q 25My Neighbor Totoro was released in 1988 as a double bill with which Takahata film?
Grave of the Fireflies
Grave of the Fireflies, a wartime tragedy, shared the bill with Totoro from April 16, 1988; both films won great reviews, yet neither did well at the box office.
Q 26What eventually turned My Neighbor Totoro into a money-spinner that sustained Studio Ghibli for years?
Merchandising rights approved in 1990
Merchandising rights approved in 1990 put plush Totoros in the shops two years after the film's modest run in cinemas, and their sales covered the studio's production deficits.
Q 27Which relative of Miyazaki inspired the character Mei in My Neighbor Totoro?
His niece
His niece, Mei Okuyama, was the model; years later she married Pixar art director Dice Tsutsumi after they met again through his charity auction to protect the forest behind the film.
Q 28The bedridden mother in My Neighbor Totoro echoes Miyazaki's own mother, who suffered from what?
Spinal tuberculosis
Spinal tuberculosis kept her in bed for most of his school years, first in hospital and then at home, where he and his brothers took over the housework.
Q 29Which Swedish city, along with the island town of Visby, inspired the seaside town in Kiki's Delivery Service?
Stockholm
Stockholm and Visby were photographed for reference and blended into Koriko, a port that exists only in the film, where the 13-year-old witch arrives alone to start her courier service.
Q 30Which Miyazaki film began as a 45-minute in-flight movie for Japan Airlines before growing into a feature?
Porco Rosso
Porco Rosso kept the airline as a major investor, so it was shown to passengers in the air before it reached cinemas in July 1992.