Joe Hisaishi

Studio Ghibli’s animated feature-length films would be hard to imagine without the music of Joe Hisaishi. The Japanese composer, conductor, and pianist was already a veteran of Japan’s anime scene when he first collaborated with animator Hayao Miyazaki in the early 1980s: this was on the groundbreaking Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the success of which led to the creation of Studio Ghibli. Hisaishi’s ability to capture the essential spirit of onscreen characters proved the ideal complement to Miyazaki’s gift for storytelling. Though their partnership has drawn inevitable comparisons with that between Steven Spielberg and John Williams, it stands alone in the history of animated film. In addition to Miyazaki, Hisaishi has worked with many other filmmakers, including Yōjirō Takita, Takeshi Kitano, and Frédéric Lepage. Joe Hisaishi, born Mamoru Fujisawa in Nakano in 1950, was introduced to music as a four-year-old student of the Suzuki violin method. His childhood was also infused with the soundtrack scores he heard with his father, a film fan who introduced his son to around 300 movies a year. Those formative experiences were fortified by his subsequent studies at Tokyo’s Kunitachi College of Music and discovery of the minimalist works of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Hisaishi’s own brand of minimalism, present in the pulsing rhythms of his 1981 debut album MKWAJU, has evolved in company with a more romantic form of expression in his Studio Ghibli scores, delightfully so in Spirited Away and with dark-hued intensity in Princess Mononoke.