Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki: Japan's political shift drew me out of retirement

Hayao Miyazaki was, arguably, born in the wrong era. The acclaimed filmmaker's works are full of steam trains, horse-drawn carriages and propeller-driven aircraft. His characters are straight out of the 1950s - think trilby hats instead of baseball caps and picnic baskets rather than rucksacks - while the views are those of an idyllic childhood of yesteryear.

The past still permeates Miyazaki's present; sitting in his wood-panelled studio, in the west Tokyo suburb of Koganei, we are surrounded by a loudly ticking grandfather clock, a grand piano and a coal-and-wood fired stove.

Now 74, the media-shy director has never disguised his pro-environment and anti-militaristic opinions - even when Japan's far right attacked him as "a traitor to his country" - but, after the release in Japan in 2013 of what he described as his final film, The Wind Rises, Miyazaki was expected to once again ensconce himself in his own privacy.

A little over a year later, however, he has been roused to such anger that he cannot sit back and say nothing.

Miyazaki is not a man to raise his voice or physically demonstrate that anger, but his opposition to the policies and actions of Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, are clear. Revising Japan's pacifist constitution is "a very unfortunate development", he says, in a masterstroke of understatement, while halting the enlargement of the United States Marine Corps' Camp Schwab, in Okinawa, is "essential to the creation of a peaceful East Asia".