Goro Miyazaki’s Blog 2-24-06: The Only Way for Me to Know My Father was Through His Works

UPDATE: The official site has posted an interview with producer Toshio Suzuki that once and for all lays out why Goro Miyazaki was chosen to direct AND why his father Hayao Miyazaki was against it. In short, Hayao Miyazaki is one of those guys who has to be in control at all times. He was OK with Goro working on the film but was dead set against letting him direct until he saw that Goro could draw just as well as his father… stay tuned for a translation!

In celebration of the best comment I have yet received on this site, I bring you another exciting installment of Goro Miyazaki’s blog!

I don’t know what things were like before, but ever since I can remember my father was often not around. That said, just as I loved my mother, I loved my father, and when I was small I wanted him to pay attention to me and play with me. However, there were almost no chances for that.

Going into junior high and high school, my father was not near me when I began to be conscious of him, thinking “I want to know about my father” and “What is my father thinking about?” The relationship was such that even though I met face to face with him once in a while I did not know what to say since we normally never talked.

My father rarely talked with me nor met with me much. For me, there was only one way to know such a father. That would be watching the films that he created. I tried somehow to glean what kind of person my father was and what he was living his life thinking about through what was expressed in those films.

I also watched and enjoyed the anime “Urusei Yatsura,” “Mobile Suits Gundam,” and “The Super Dimension Fortress Macross” when I was in junior high and high school. However, the way I watched those and the way I watched the movies produced by my father were decidedly different.

The more I thought my father’s works were wonderful, the more I wanted to know about him through the works, and that pointed me in the direction of his works.

In that way, I watched Hayao Miyazaki’s films simultaneously to enjoy them and understand my father. In my book, Hayao Miyazaki may get a zero for fatherhood but an A+ as a director of animated films.