The Kingdom Of Dreams and Madness

“The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.” ― Hayao Miyazaki When we first started working on our website, we had several ideas for a quote to add at the end. A quote that could directly communicate what we wanted to stand for as a studio or a collective of creatives. There were all kinds of quotes ranging from motivational ones by known figures to ones that address design thinking by notable designers. At some point we even thought about having the quote be an old Japanese Haiku by Matsuo Basho, a well-known Zen master from the Edo period. It went like this “Old pond A frog jumps in – The sound of water” Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) This Haiku was on of my favourites given that it accurately describes one of my favourite subjects that I love to learn about, Zen Buddhism. It'd be very hard to accurately pin down what it means exactly but I think describing it would be counter-intuitive to its meaning. Getting back to our point though, because this blog is all about our various passions as a team of illustrators and illustration-enthusiasts. The day I was about to finally just throw in a quote from a long list of ones that we assembled, I was watching Princess Mononoke (For the 14th time), and I remembered how much I enjoyed the dialogues. You can easily pick-up amazing quotes from the movie that would serve as a superb life motto. I got back to the origin of this movie along with various other ones, and I again ended up watching a movie titled "Kingdom of dreams and madness", the movie about the studio that created all of those fascinating movies that I endlessly watch till now. Ghibli Studios has been and probably always will be a source of inspiration and happiness in my life. The movies they craft speak of people actively seeking life, struggling in worlds so full of injustice. One of the studio's founder, Hayao Miyazaki, has portrayed this very well in his movies. Making the will to live a common theme amongst his worlds. I eventually looked around in the movie and interviews and I stumbled upon one of the most fascinating quotes I ever came upon “The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.”. When I stumbled upon this, it immediately hit me that this is it. This quote represents all what we want to stand for. The worlds that this amazing studio crafts are a production process of a chaotic and turbulent nature. This process is full of failures, learning, developing, creating, re-creating, and finally embracing what you create. In the spirit of creation, YAK will always actively strive towards continuous learning. We have a long road to go and we are too excited to have everyone on board. This has been a relatively long mini-blog but rambling about our favourite topics is something we'll be doing a lot from now on. We are currently creating an illustration for the Spirited away Bathhouse. A fascinating intricate structure in an equally fascinating world. Once we are done with it, we are gonna animate bits of it in an attempt to learn animation! Bear with us this might take some time!