For most listeners, Joe Hisaishi’s music and Hayao Miyazaki’s films are inseparable — two halves of the same experience, as naturally paired as image and sound. Yet the story of how that partnership came to exist is surprisingly little known. It did not begin with a commission, or a grand creative vision shared between equals. It began, almost accidentally, with a record that was never supposed to matter.
In the early 1980s, Joe Hisaishi was not yet a household name. He was, by his own description, an effort-driven composer rather than a natural genius — someone who had spent his twenties pursuing music that most audiences would never hear. After studying composition at Kunitachi College of Music, he had been drawn not to the mainstream but to the edges: minimalism, the radical American movement pioneered by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, in which tiny musical cells repeat and shift almost imperceptibly over time. “There is still possibility here,” he recalled thinking when he first encountered it at twenty. It was not a commercial instinct. It was a conviction.
Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, he worked steadily in commercial music — TV scores, advertising jingles, the unglamorous machinery of the industry — while pursuing his own artistic vision in parallel. But he grew restless. The constraints of standard TV scoring, the rushed recording sessions, the indifference to craft, all of it wore on him. He pulled back from film work and turned his attention to his own albums, where he could work with the precision and patience he believed the music deserved.
When he did accept film work, he brought with him an unusual philosophy: that a composer should maintain a single, recognisable voice across every project, rather than shapeshifting to meet each brief. “I always want to be a special brand,” he told Kinema Junpo in 1987. The music he made in those years — spare, modal, rooted in something like Irish folk melody filtered through a minimalist sensibility — was distinctly his own. He had, in other words, spent years making himself into exactly the kind of composer no one was looking for. And then, in 1983, a phone call changed everything.
The Image Album
The production of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was, by any measure, an ambitious undertaking. Director Hayao Miyazaki was attempting something Japan’s film industry had little experience with: an epic animated feature on a Hollywood scale, drawn from his own sprawling manga. Finding a composer for the score proved equally difficult. Producer and music director Isao Takahata worked through a list of candidates — Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, Yuji Takahashi, Hikaru Hayashi — meeting some, consulting others. Among them, it seems, was the composer Hisaishi would later refer to only as “Composer A” — their identity never disclosed. Whoever it was, Tokuma and the record label pushed hard for their appointment, and for a time it appeared the matter was settled.
Hisaishi’s entry into the project came through a different door. Japan in the early 1980s was entering an era of extraordinary cultural and economic energy — anime was expanding rapidly, manga was finding new audiences, and the broader entertainment industry had money to spend in unusual ways. It had become fashionable, in this climate, to release music albums based on manga properties, even for works not yet adapted into film. Record labels commissioned composers to translate the world of a story into sound before any animation existed. It was a luxury that the times allowed. A representative at Tokuma Japan suggested Hisaishi’s name for one such image album — a set of atmospheric pieces that would capture the world of the film before production began in earnest.
Having accepted the commission, Hisaishi made his way to a small office in Asagaya, in western Tokyo, to meet the director for the first time. The room was sparse — one or two desks, not much else. A man with glasses sat alone at the centre of it, quiet and unassuming. The walls around him were covered entirely in paintings: landscapes from no particular time or place, worlds that did not quite exist yet.
Miyazaki greeted him briefly, then turned almost immediately to the walls and began to explain, picture by picture. “This is the Sea of Decay.” “This is the Valley of the Wind.” Hisaishi stood and listened, nodding. He had read the manga before coming, but it was only now, watching Miyazaki move from image to image with complete absorption, that the world began to take shape in his mind. “I felt a strong impact,” he later wrote. “Such a gentle, good person — and yet someone who had thrown himself into this completely, with total seriousness.”
He set to work. He placed synthesisers at the centre, surrounding them with folk instruments: the Andean kena flute, tabla drums, dulcimer. The result was something atmospheric and ancient-feeling, rooted in no single tradition. As far as Hisaishi was concerned, that was where his involvement ended — a single album, a finished job. He had no reason to expect otherwise.
The Gamble
The image album, however, refused to stay an image. Miyazaki and Takahata listened — and found they could not let it go. Meetings with Composer A continued, music was presented, but neither man could be persuaded that it was right for the film. The record label and the wider Tokuma group pushed back hard, arguing on commercial and logistical grounds that Composer A was the only viable choice. Miyazaki and Takahata refused to move. “We cannot do something we are not convinced by,” they said, and held firm. The dispute dragged on through the end of the year.
In Miyazaki’s mind, Hisaishi recalled being told later, the image album had been playing all along — its melodies running beneath the arguments, insisting on themselves. When the new year came, the decision finally turned. It was Takahata who acted as the deciding voice, bringing Hisaishi in for the full score. “When I heard that later,” Hisaishi wrote, “I was genuinely moved.”
Takahata’s reasoning, as producer Toshio Suzuki later recalled, went beyond technique. “His songs were wonderful, but more than that — Takahata said this person could sing of human trust with a raised voice. He saw that.” The character of the music mattered less than the character of the man behind it. Someone who could believe in a story about a girl saving the world, and mean it.
It was, as Suzuki put it plainly, a gamble.
The Music of Nausicaä
Now working on the full score, Hisaishi entered a collaboration unlike anything he had experienced. Miyazaki had been listening to the image album on repeat as he drew; by the time production moved to the actual score, the music had already become part of how he saw the film. The sessions that followed were exhaustive. “The discussions about music went on for ten hours at a time,” Hisaishi recalled. Both Miyazaki and Takahata listened with exceptional care, catching harmonic references, pushing back on nuances, arriving at each session with specific and informed requests.
Hisaishi found a guiding principle for where the music should sit within the film. Rather than following Nausicaä’s emotions, he would follow her gaze — placing music not at moments of feeling, but at moments of perception, when she saw something that asked to be understood. “I put the music through Nausicaä’s eyes,” he said. It was a formal solution with a philosophical undertone: the music would observe the world alongside the protagonist, not instruct the audience how to feel about it.
The Melody That Stayed
What Hisaishi had not anticipated was which part of his work would be noticed. When he made the image album, his attention had been on sound rather than melody — on texture, on ethnic instrumentation, on rhythmic intensity. “I wasn’t yet aware of myself as a melody-maker,” he later wrote. “I was focused on what kind of sound to create.” The folk instruments, the hard-edged rhythms, the synthesiser layers: these were what he had laboured over. The melodies, in his own mind, were almost incidental.
It was Miyazaki and Takahata who heard otherwise. Both praised the melodies directly — and Hisaishi found this genuinely surprising. He had not known that was what he was doing.
The main theme — later titled Kaze no Densetsu, the Legend of the Wind — carried within it everything he had been building toward without realising it: the modal quality of Irish and Scottish folk song, the spare repetition of his minimalist training, and something warmer underneath, what Miyazaki would later describe as a “boy’s pathos,” a quality of earnest feeling held just beneath the surface.
Miyazaki, Suzuki recalled, listened to it over and over while working. “The anxiety disappeared completely,” Suzuki said of the moment he first heard it. “I knew we hadn’t been wrong.” The film was a substantial success. In a single work, Hisaishi had moved from the margins to the centre of Japanese film music — not by changing who he was, but by finding a project large enough to show what he already was.
A Partnership for Forty Years
The Nausicaä collaboration established something that neither man fully articulated at the time, but that has since proved durable beyond almost any comparable partnership in cinema. Miyazaki’s next film, Castle in the Sky, brought Hisaishi back; My Neighbour Totoro deepened the relationship further, with a now-famous scene — Satsuki’s encounter with Totoro at the bus stop — where Hisaishi composed a quietly ethereal, minimalist piece in defiance of Miyazaki’s initial instruction to leave it silent. Miyazaki heard the result and approved it without hesitation. Suzuki, who had engineered the manoeuvre without telling either party, felt that something had been confirmed. “I was convinced,” he wrote, “that the Miyazaki–Hisaishi partnership had been born.”
In a 2010 interview, Miyazaki reflected on what had kept them together across more than four decades. “His music suits my vulgarity,” he said — meaning, in his characteristically deflecting way, that Hisaishi understood the popular dimension of what he was making, the side that wanted to move people directly and without apology. But beneath that, he identified something more specific: the “boy’s pathos” that runs through Hisaishi’s work, a quality of unguarded sincerity that Miyazaki recognised as akin to his own. “Hand to hand, with different methods, we have survived,” he said. “I think we’ll go all the way to the end together.”
It began with a gamble, a stack of sketches, and a phone that rang at the right moment. What followed was one of the most sustained creative partnerships in the history of animated cinema — built, as the best ones are, on the recognition that two people, working separately toward their own visions, somehow make each other more fully themselves. The image album was supposed to be the end of the job. It turned out to be the beginning of everything.
Sources
- Joe Hisaishi, I Am — Haruka naru Ongaku no Michi e, KADOKAWA, 1992
- “Geijutsu to taishūsei no hazama de tatakau zenshin ongakka,” AERA, No. 48, 1 November 2010
- Otona no! Kakugen, TBS / book edition, 2014
- Joe Hisaishi interview, Roman Album: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Tokuma Shoten, 1984
- “Tsune ni Special Brand de aritai,” Kinema Junpo, No. 963, December 1987