Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki

Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese television documentary about the animator Hayao Miyazaki after he announced his retirement from feature filmmaking in 2013. Unable to stay idle, he begins work on a short film about a caterpillar named Boro, but finds he cannot draw its complex movements by hand, so he turns to a team of CGI animators. The film follows that encounter between a director long devoted to hand-drawn animation and a younger generation working in three-dimensional computer graphics, and it also observes his day-to-day life away from production. Toshio Suzuki, Nobuo Kawakami, Atsushi Okui, Michiyo Yasuda and Yukinori Nakamura appear as themselves alongside Miyazaki, and the production involved Studio Ghibli and NHK.

The documentary was directed and written by Kaku Arakawa, an NHK filmmaker who had previously made How Ponyo Was Born: Hayao Miyazaki's Thought Process in 2009; he later directed Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron in 2024. Running seventy minutes, this is a television production rather than a theatrical release.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.9 from around a thousand votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.4 from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 7.1 from sixteen reviews places it close to the audience scores, suggesting a generally favourable but not unanimous reception for this portrait of the animator's post-retirement years.