An interesting pattern Nabeel Qureshi mentions about what makes Miyazaki's movies so special:
[00:10:22] Dan: Another director you cited that you love before, Miyazaki. What do you think that he understands that maybe Disney, other animation studios are overlooking, and they don't quite get?
[00:10:31] Nabeel: Oh, yes. This is one of my favorite topics. I think Miyazaki just makes movies for adults that are also for children. He really takes children seriously as full beings, if you will. That's very important. If you watch interviews with him, he's always saying, I think kids have a very good sense of the issues that we think of as adult issues. Life and death is a simple example. Even a movie that's relatively on the child-like side of his canon, like My Neighbor Totoro, it's actually a pretty serious plot because the mother is on the verge of death, and she's sick the whole time. It's showing how these two children cope with that.
Another example is Kiki's Delivery Service. It's charming, right? It's this teenage girl, she's going to become a witch, and she's going to learn to fly. I feel like Disney would take this in a very whimsical childlike direction. Actually, it's a drag, she moves to this Stockholm-like city. She has to get a job and work. It's a grind. She gets sick. Nobody cares about her. There's all these things that happen that you wouldn't really expect to happen in a kid's movie. Yes, I think his secret is he takes children very, very seriously, which I think most adults do not by default. He makes movies for children as though they were fully conscious beings. [Emphasis Mine]