![]() Suddenly I was about to make a feature film, and he was appalled.” “It was because I was completely inexperienced,” Goro says, who consistently refers to his father in formal terms as “Miyazaki Hayao.” “Not only had I never directed a film, I had never been in the animation industry. There was criticism too from Hayao Miyazaki, who made it clear - publicly - that he didn’t like Goro invading his turf. And Le Guin has complained that she was assured Hayao Miyazaki would supervise the project and has sniped at Goro’s finished version, saying that it is too violent and lacks subtlety in its portrayal of evil. First, other young animators at the studio ironically saw it as a case of paternalism. There was great resistance to his arrival. Instead, Ghibli’s powerful producer Toshio Suzuki handed the project to Goro, who had started to hang around animation study groups and present ideas of his own. By the time she relented, the older Miyazaki had announced his retirement from making films (a vow he has since retracted). Hayao Miyazaki had wanted to make a film version of the “Earthsea” book series more than 20 years ago but had been rebuffed by Ursula K. Miyazaki became the museum’s managing director in 2001, a job he gave up last year when he started messing around in the real studio with the “Earthsea” project. The museum showcases animated characters from the studio’s catalog of films and has a hands-on exhibit of an animation studio. He studied forestry at Shinshu University and started a career in landscape design, planning parks and gardens and working on urban tree-planting projects.īut in 1998 he took on responsibility for the design of the Ghibli Museum, a theme park the studio was building in a rare splash of green space in a Tokyo suburb. “Until I left home to go to university, my father was too busy and didn’t have the opportunity to even chat with me.”Īnimation was not something he discussed much in the Miyazaki home, nor a field to which the young Goro aspired. “It was really just me and my mother when I was growing up any advice I needed I got from her,” he says. Miyazaki says his father was, like so many fathers of the generation that grew up in postwar Japan, singularly focused on his work. The children had to grow up on their own, but they were stronger mentally because of it.” “They were busy at work, didn’t have so much money. “In the past, parents did not dote so much on their children,” he says. He describes Japan as a society in which children are pampered and showered with material plenty, yet lead lives devoid of purpose: no injustices to rail against, as Miyazaki said he did when he was young, no older generation’s values to overthrow. “The setting is Europe, but the characters are a portrait of the young generation of Japanese,” Miyazaki explains. More ominously, the dragons that long ago opted out of man’s world have returned and begun to fight each other. Something is amiss in this world as the movie opens. ![]() “Earthsea’s” backgrounds look like they’ve been drawn by English landscape artists, the skies could be canvases of a Dutch Old Master. This is not “Cars” with dragons or “Over the Hedge” in a bigger landscape. And it is some of these kids who might feel like killing their parents.”īut before the youngsters watching “Earthsea” get any murderous ideas, they’re going to have to get their heads around a universe drawn with an almost old-fashioned look. “Arren represents the young generation in Japan. “It’s not an experience of my own, but the experience of the young people I have met,” he continues. “No, I never felt I wanted to kill my father - because we didn’t have that much of a relationship to begin with,” says the younger Miyazaki during an interview in the Tokyo offices of Studio Ghibli, the animation house Hayao Miyazaki built with the success of such films as “My Neighbor Totoro” and, more recently, “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” “I never thought that scene was about me when I was making the film. He is merely filled with an inner rage he can’t explain.
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