The Scrambler Who Built a Legacy by Accident
Animation Obsessive's deep dive into the origins of Sherlock Hound (1984-1985) offers a portrait of Hayao Miyazaki that complicates the genius-auteur mythology that has long surrounded him. The Miyazaki who emerges here is not the serene master of Studio Ghibli legend, but a restless, self-doubting journeyman approaching 40, convinced he was recycling old ideas, and taking jobs largely because they were there. That this period of creative anxiety produced work that would stun Disney animators and launch multiple legendary careers is one of animation history's richer ironies.
A Director Who Did Not Want to Direct
The article opens with a striking contradiction at the heart of Miyazaki's early career. Here was someone who had already directed Future Boy Conan and The Castle of Cagliostro, yet openly resisted being labeled a director. After Cagliostro bombed at the box office despite being thrown together in under five months, Miyazaki's self-assessment was brutal:
You can't use a sullied middle-aged guy to create fresh work that will wow viewers. I realized I should never do this again.
Yet the world disagreed. Telecom head Yutaka Fujioka was carting Cagliostro prints to Hollywood, screening the film for hundreds of Disney staff to rapturous applause. The gap between Miyazaki's self-perception and his actual impact is enormous, and it raises a question the article does not quite confront: was this self-doubt genuine artistic humility, or the kind of perfectionism that can become its own form of vanity? An artist who dismisses his own masterwork as leftovers is not necessarily being honest with himself.
The Italy Problem
The co-production dynamics between Japan and Italy form the article's most compelling thread. Italian executive Luciano Scaffa and the Pagot siblings brought the concept of a dog-Sherlock Holmes to Telecom, riding the wave of Japanese animation's explosive popularity in Italy. But from the moment Miyazaki got involved, the collaboration was headed for friction.
The Italians envisioned something flat and graphic, in the Pink Panther vein. Miyazaki wanted three-dimensional space. As animator Kazuhide Tomonaga explained:
If the perception of space is realistic, then, even if the characters do cartoony and comical things, it doesn't look like a lie, right? The characters definitely feel like they're moving with their feet firmly grounded.
This philosophical divide reveals something important about Miyazaki's approach. He was not simply being difficult or imposing Japanese aesthetics over Italian ones. He was applying a theory of animation learned from Isao Takahata: that realistic spatial continuity is what makes the fantastical believable. It is a theory that would later underpin everything from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away. But in the context of a commercial co-production intended for children's television, it was wildly impractical.
The Italian side had legitimate complaints. The colors were too dark. The first episode alone used nearly 10,000 cels, feature-film-level resources for a television series. Miyazaki's auteurism was making the show too expensive and too idiosyncratic for its intended market. When the Italians pushed back, Miyazaki was furious:
They were doodling during the meeting, drawing things like a propeller on top of Holmes' deerstalker cap. That kind of American TV cartoon nonsense was their intention all along.
There is a counterpoint worth raising here. Scaffa and the Pagots were not philistines; they were experienced animation professionals who understood their audience. The propeller-on-the-hat anecdote makes them look foolish, but co-productions require compromise, and Miyazaki's refusal to work within commercial constraints is precisely what caused the series to collapse financially. The Italian funding dried up by mid-1982. One can admire the artistic result while acknowledging that the production model was unsustainable.
The Training Ground
Perhaps the most significant legacy of Sherlock Hound is not the animation itself but the people it developed. Yoshifumi Kondo, who would later direct Whisper of the Heart, did character designs. Nizo Yamamoto supervised backgrounds with obsessive care, painting individual bricks in distinct colors. A young student named Sunao Katabuchi, with no screenplay experience, pitched a script for the series and was eventually promoted to assistant director. Katabuchi would go on to direct In This Corner of the World, one of the finest animated films of the 21st century.
Katabuchi's description of the series' animating philosophy is particularly illuminating:
Animated films for children aren't all "cartoon movies." It's more like... if I were to give you one similar example, it would be playing tag on the jungle gym as a child. ... I think there's a kind of "mechanical environment" involved. A maze full of contrivances? A childlike sense of excitement for such a place. ... Moreover, no matter what happens, no one dies or gets hurt.
This notion of animation as a safe playground with real spatial logic connects directly to what made Miyazaki's later Ghibli work so distinctive. The seeds were planted here, in a failed co-production about a dog detective, by a team that was largely learning on the job.
Failure as Fertilizer
The article's chronology reveals a pattern that defined Miyazaki's pre-Ghibli years. He would take a project, invest disproportionate care and effort, deliver something far beyond what was asked for, and then watch it stall or fail commercially. Cagliostro bombed. Sherlock Hound went into storage after only four completed episodes. Animage magazine called it a "phantom masterpiece" in 1983.
Meanwhile, Miyazaki was sneaking out of the Telecom building at 11 p.m. to go home and draw his Nausicaa manga until dawn:
I would sit at my desk in the middle of the night, desperately drawing manga pages and cursing. Then in the morning I would put my brain back on Sherlock Hound as I drove to the studio. I did this every day.
The image is almost comically punishing, yet out of this period of exhaustion and self-doubt came the manga that would become Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which in turn led to the founding of Studio Ghibli. The argument Animation Obsessive builds, though it does not state it quite so directly, is that Miyazaki's scrambling years were not a detour from his real career but the essential crucible that forged it.
One small moment captures the growth beautifully. During dubbing for the Blue Ruby episode, Takahata noticed a deliberate pause in the dialogue as Sherlock speaks to a child thief falling asleep. Takahata assumed it was a mistake, insisting that Miyazaki would never use such a technique. But when they checked the original storyboard, the pause was there by design. Miyazaki had outgrown even his mentor's expectations.
Bottom Line
Animation Obsessive delivers a meticulously sourced account of a project that sits at a fascinating crossroads: Italian co-production ambitions, Japanese animation craftsmanship, and the personal crisis of an artist who had not yet become the figure the world would celebrate. The article is at its best when exploring the tensions between commercial imperatives and artistic vision, and when tracing the careers that Sherlock Hound helped launch. It could push harder on the question of whether Miyazaki's uncompromising approach was entirely admirable or partly self-defeating, given that it contributed to the production's financial collapse. But as a case study in how great work can emerge from messy, underfunded, conflict-ridden circumstances, it is first-rate. The lesson is not that genius triumphs over adversity. It is that a team of dedicated artists, working beyond what anyone asked of them, can turn a dog-detective cartoon into something that still resonates four decades later.