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10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki (Part 3/3)
I wrote before about how fascinating it was the Hayao Miyazaki, one of the three cofounders of Studio Ghibli and a notoriously private grump, gave a Japanese college student permission to follow him around and film everything. What started as a promotional doc for the animated film Ponyo became a 10-year running odyssey that recorded Miyazaki’s cool attitude towards up-and-coming Ghibli directors, including his own son’s first film. Without a true successor to head directing at the Studio, Miyazaki decided to come back and helm “one more” ambitious film before retiring…
The final part of the doc (with all parts streaming on NHK’s website here) picks up in 2012, during production on The Wind Rises. Miyazaki had said he wasn’t sure if he’d make more films during the production of Ponyo, and indeed took a long break afterwards. But he’s now back with a vengeance. Perhaps it was his need to “backseat drive” while his son was directing from Miyazaki’s script for From Up On Poppy Hill. Or perhaps it was that he’d made such a point early-on in Ponyo’s development to try to do something different artistically, only to have Ponyo come out like a <ahem> watered-down, derivative version of things he’d done before.
While a box office hit, Japanese critics had been somewhat unimpressed, as was his longtime friend and producer Toshio Suzuki, who literally comments…
