“It was like a brutal relentless winter that had no end in sight” said acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki, in an exclusive interview with Anime Maru.

“I was on my Macintosh Personal Computer in the summer of 1984. We all knew it was coming, but we didn’t expect it to be so painful. Then, it finally occurred. I went to get a spicy desktop background, and after waiting 2 hours for my modem to load Anime Paper, I suddenly I found that I was looking at thousands of wallpapers that I had already seen. You couldn’t dream of such a horror. It wasn’t long after that some of my closest friends experienced the same thing. Pretty soon it was an all out national crisis. Shock, panic, despair; the civilization that we had worked so hard to achieve was broken in an instant. People were roaming the streets, cameras in hand, just hoping to find one unique piece of reality that was untouched. Just a mere glimpse of originality for our computer screens, but there was no hope for us. Man had finally succumb to his years of playing god; we were paying the price of our hubris of technology.”

“I knew we had to act fast, or this would be the end of all that we had worked for. That’s when it hit me: What if we made 2D girls that were so cute, you would love them more than real girls? The idea was insane, absolutely idiotic, but I knew it was the only chance we had. I pulled out my pencil and paper and begun going to work on characters. I quickly realized that no one would care about these girls unless they had a wonderful backstory. It was a lot of work, but I ended up getting my dear friend Takahata to assist me and we formed a studio. We began work on Nausicaa of the Valley in the Wind. But we just wanted peace. Peace from the pain of the great Desktop Background Shortage.”

“One film came after another. I did everything I could to stave off the lack of desktop backgrounds. But now we’re in a different time. Am I sad to see what has become of anime? A bit. Every time I see an animation of some bimbo swaying her gigantic jello cowtits to play a game of limbo, my heart dies a little. But as I look at said bimbo in a bikini, staring at me timidly, filling up my computer background space, I feel no regret. I did what needed to be done.”

When asked how he could have accessed images on the internet in 1984, and after our interviewer noted that the Macintosh Personal Computer didn’t support desktop backgrounds, Miyazaki quietly nodded his head while staring into the distance.

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