"In my own view, the “big bang” of otaku history is the anime director Miyazaki Hayao’s experience watching Hakujaden (Panda and the Magic Serpent). Released in 1958, this was Japan’s first color theatrical animation and in 1961 became the first Japanese animated film to be shown in the United States. Miyazaki saw it as a teenager and fell in love with its heroine, then went on to become Japan’s master of the animated image. But from one perspective, his work has a quality of Freudian “repetition compulsion” that is sad. Possessed as a boy by an anime beauty, Miyazaki is fated to produce one charming heroine of his own after another, and through them to support otaku culture. This compulsion that revolves around beautiful young girls (largely absent in Miyazaki’s creative partner Takahata Isao, for example) repeats the initial trauma of Miyazaki’s early experience. This is clearly a chain of transference: a transference from receiver to transmitter mediated by the icon of the beautiful girl. Miyazaki’s inability to escape it is shown by his countertransferent dislike for adult anime fans (otaku), a scorn he makes no effort to disguise".

Saito Tamaki "Otaku Sexuality"