Goro Miyazaki wrote and directed Tales from Earthsea (2006), a project his father Hayao Miyazaki had long wanted to adapt. Hayao didn’t approve of his son leading the project due to his inexperience and they allegedly didn’t speak while his son adapted the series into a movie. Goro had been reluctant to follow in his father’s footsteps and worked in landscaping for years before joining Studio Ghibli. During Tales from Earthsea production, Goro said that his dad “gets zero marks as a father but full marks as a director of animated films.”
Goro begins the movie with Prince Arren killing his father, the king.
This does not happen in the book series.
Hayao announced plans to retire four separate times since 1997, but continued to work - compelled to share poignant and internationally acclaimed stories with the world. His latest movie, The Boy and the Heron (2023), centers on themes of family ties and legacy and feels like a public acknowledgment of and reply to his and Goro’s relationship and their history with the animation studio.
In The Boy and the Heron, the main character, young Mahito, is drawn into a magical and fantastic other world while searching for his step-mother and is drawn by claims that his deceased mother is still alive in this other world. While he is there, the powerful wizard who rules the dimension (who happens to be Mahito’s grand-uncle) has chosen Mahito to be his heir in magically maintaining the world’s existence and its power.
Mahito refuses. He chooses to leave the fantasy realm to return to his own world with his step-mother despite the hardships he had been experiencing there. This decision sentences the other world to immediate destruction, but Mahito and his step-mother safely escape back to their own world and happily reunite with Mahito’s father.
Studio Ghibli does not have a successor to Hayao Miyazaki’s role and legacy.
I just… I got a lot of feelings about this.
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