Miyazaki is not the only filmmaker making feature animated films at Studio Ghibli. The Secret World of Arrietty, written and produced by Miyazaki, and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, opened in the U.S. in 2012 and actually grossed more ($19.2 million) than any of Miyazaki's films have in North America to date. But much of that audience would likely have never flocked to the film had Miyazaki's name not been on it. And with the rest of the world of feature animation so deeply invested in 3D computer architecture — and often pulling in near-billion-dollar grosses as a result — it's hard not to wonder how much longer Miyazaki's 2D, hand-drawn process can last. The last major 2D animated feature release in the U.S., Disney's The Princess and the Frog, was seen as a financial failure. "People like to blame box office success or failure on the medium rather than any number of other factors that go into it," said Unkrich. "So there's not a lot of financial incentive now for big studios to do hand-drawn animation. A lot of them see it as old fashioned and not current. Of course, we all know it's just as beautiful and deserving of being in the world as anything that we're doing [at Pixar]."

As he was in the middle of making Toy Story 3, in fact, Unkrich found himself unwittingly sitting in the middle of the collision between Miyazaki's small 2D animated world and the much larger world of 3D animation. In an early draft of the script, screenwriter Michael Arndt tossed in a reference to the young character of Bonnie owning a plush version of Totoro, the title character from Miyazaki's 1988 film My Neighbor Totoro (which didn't reach most U.S. audiences until the mid-2000s). "He didn't do it with any ulterior motive in mind," said Unkrich. "He just needed to write something on the page. But we ran with it, just for fun, thinking we'll never be able to do this. We started storyboarding one of the characters being a Totoro. And he was in the reels. John [Lasseter] was delighted to see him there. And at a certain point, we thought, well, why don't we do this?" Miraculously, Studio Ghibli granted Pixar the rights to the character — Lasseter's close friendship with Miyazaki likely didn't hurt — but the final OK did not come until Miyazaki himself happened to pay a visit to Pixar's studios in Emeryville, Calif., while Toy Story 3 was still in production.

"It was the first time, I think, he was ever seeing one of his characters rendered in 3D," said Unkrich. "We made it very clear that we weren't trying to animate Totoro the character, but we were animating a plush figure of Totoro — there was a distinction between the two. He was sitting right next to me as I showed it to him. There was long pause, and he just kind of gave an ever-so-slight nod and just went, 'Humph.' And that was it. That was his tacit approval that we could put Totoro in the film. That was kind of the end of it."