Director fights to get out of father's shadow

TOKYO—Fans of Japan's distinctive style of full-length animated films gave a standing ovation at this year's Venice Film Festival to the latest movie from Japan's famed Studio Ghibli.
The applause that greeted the presentation of "Gedo Senki" -- "Tales of Earthsea" in English -- reinforced the success of a film which topped charts in Japan for over a month.
All this was heady stuff for neophyte director Goro Miyazaki, the eldest son of Hayao Miyazaki, Japan's most famous animator and creator of the Academy Award-winning movie "Spirited Away."
Yet Miyazaki was not accompanied to Venice by his proud father, a telling sign of the deep rivalry between the two men as the younger Miyazaki struggles to make his mark as a director.
Even more symbolic, perhaps, is the film's shocking opening scene in which a frustrated young prince stabs his father to death -- a scene not without personal resonance for the 39-year-old Goro.
"For Hayao Miyazaki, now that I've made one movie, as far as he's concerned I've become a sort of rival," Goro said in an interview at Ghibli headquarters in western Tokyo, referring to his father by his full name throughout an hour-long chat.
His father fiercely opposed the plan to have his son direct "Gedo Senki," based on the internationally renowned "Earthsea" series of fantasy books by Ursula K. Le Guin.
"To have somebody inexperienced like me suddenly make an almost two-hour movie was something he could only think of as reckless, something that would profane the animation," Goro said.
Goro has described his childhood as a time when his busy father was almost never at home.
"From the time I became aware of things up to the present, we have almost never talked," Goro wrote in an Internet diary entry titled "Zero Points as a Father, Top Points as a Director."
In another entry, he described how he realized in junior high school that the only way to understand his father was through his movies.
As a child, Goro was interested in animation himself but quickly abandoned ideas of a career in the field.
"I knew I probably didn't have his talent for drawing or animation," he said. "If I did the same thing as him, of course I'd be compared. So I thought I'd choose a different path," he said.
After studying forestry science and working as a landscape planner, he designed a popular museum devoted to his father's work and ran it until last year, when he was chosen to direct "Gedo Senki" despite his father's misgivings.
What followed were 10 months of hard work, during which he neither asked for, nor received, paternal advice.
When the film was released, it leapt to the top of Japanese box office charts and stayed there until mid-September, beating such blockbusters as Walt Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."
The film is set to be shown in more than 50 countries, although contract issues will delay the U.S. release.
Critics and viewers are divided on the result, with some praising Goro for his return to a more minimalist style. Others say the film lacks the whimsy of previous Ghibli films such as "Spirited Away," which won a Best Animation Oscar in 2003.
"I think the domestic success is largely due to the Ghibli brand name," said Ryusuke Hikawa, an animation commentator.
Author Le Guin herself was disappointed in the film, saying in an e-mail from her home in Oregon that she was dismayed by many of the plot changes. Among them was the addition of the opening sequence depicting the prince committing patricide.
"Of course a movie shouldn't even try to follow a novel exactly -- they're different arts. But a novelist may fairly expect a certain fidelity to the characters and general story in a film named for books that have been in print for 40 years."
Hikawa, though, said that Miyazaki had taken on an impossible task and that any director would have fared the same in tackling such a well-known work.
For Miyazaki, the most sought-after comments may have come from his father who, in remarks relayed to his son through producer Suzuki, praised its "honest" approach. —Agencies