Time magazine, reporting from the Venice Film Festival:
“Miyazaki has decided that ‘The Wind Rises’ will be his last film, and he will now retire,” Koji Hoshino, who runs the director’s Studio Ghibli, announced.
What will Studio Ghibli look like without Hayao Miyazaki? At 72, he’s retiring from a studio he founded in 1985, after the success of animated classic “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”. Since then, he’s directed nine of the studio’s feature films, including the Academy-award winning “Spirited Away”Ghibli films have enjoyed enormous financial success in Japan: “Spirited Away”, for example, overtook “Titanic” to become the highest grossing film in Japanese history.. It’s fair to say that Miyazaki is synonymous with Ghibli: he’s had a hand in almost every film, even those that he didn’t direct.
With his retirement, Studio Ghibli will surely have to change. For the short term, things will go on as usual: another film is slated for release in 2013, directed by Isao Takahata, the other director most strongly associated with Ghibli films. But at 77, Takahata is older even than Miyazaki , and it seems plausible that he too might retire in the near future.
That leaves Gorō Miyazaki. The older Miyazaki son, Gorō was initially reluctant to follow his famous father into animation, spending several years in landscape design. But in 2006, after several years as director of the Ghibli Museum, Gorō was asked to direct his first picture, “Tales from Earthsea”. Rumor has it that his father was initially unhappy about this decision, but upon seeing the finished film, felt that Gorō had proved himself. Reviews were mixed, but the film still had Ghibli’s trademark brand of fantasy.
Gorō’s sophomore picture, “From Up On Poppy Hill”, was very different. Set in post-Korean War Japan, the animation, of course, was breathtaking. But the film told a high-school love story with a much smaller scale than any of Ghibli’s fantasy epics, and yet without the sweetness of “My Neighbour Totoro” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service” Roger Ebert’s review of “Poppy Hill” begins: “This was a day I didn’t see coming. The latest film from Japan’s Studio Ghibli, which sets the world standard for animation, is a disappointment.”
It’s also worth noting that so far, Gorō has focused only on adapting existing stories“Tales from Earthsea” was very loosely based on Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” fantasy series, and “Poppy Hill” was based on a manga series of the same name.. Indeed, every Ghibli film of the last ten years has either been directed by Hayao Miyazaki, or adapted from an existing book. Nothing wrong with adaptations, of course, but some of Ghibli’s best films have been Miyazaki’s original creations.
But an uneven beginning is not necessarily a bad thing — his father spent almost 25 years working in animation before he directed his first successful feature — Gorō still has time to catch up. The elder Miyazaki is expected to speak about his retirement from Tokyo later in the week, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he continues to be involved in film-making in some capacity. And with Studio Ghibli founder Toshio Suzuki staying on as producer, there’s no reason why they can’t keep making excellent films.
Wherever Studio Ghibli goes next, the films of Hayao Miyazaki will long be remembered in cinema history. It will be at least a few months before “The Wind Rises” is released to international audiences, but early reviews suggest it will certainly be a fitting capstone for a long and illustrious career.