He tried to lure big-name directors into Ghibli, but they didn’t gel with the studio. Toshio Suzuki tried everything in the noughties. None of the non-Hayao Miyazaki films from Ghibli have done Hayao Miyazaki numbers. When Kaguya was delayed, its box office numbers made it very clear that Takahata didn’t have the following that Miyazaki had. Takahata couldn’t get the same numbers, although Suzuki did hope to hide that by releasing The Tale of the Princess Kaguya on the same bill as The Wind Rises. Studio Ghibli spent a decade looking for some way of continuing Miyazaki’s momentum. He concluded that there was no torch but the legacy of Ghibli itself, and that’s why the Ghibli Museum is so crucial to understanding the studio’s late period.ĭo you view Shinkai, de Wit and others as “Miyazaki heirs”?
Suzuki spent ten years not just looking for someone to take the torch, but examining the torch itself, trying to work out what parts of it could be replicated by other means. You can’t have the Miyazaki phenomenon without Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki as well. Hayao Miyazaki wasn’t just a one-off, he was part of a trio. There is no torch, at least not in the way that the public expects. Mark Schilling: I n your view, has the torch truly been passed?
The question was that old favourite, the “new Miyazaki” in the light of Michael Dudok de Wit’s forthcoming Red Turtle and Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name but as ever, I preferred to think of it not in terms of the creative abilities of modern animators, but of the ways in which the industry can find an equivalent revenue stream for the biggest money-spinner of the last generation. Sometimes my brain doesn’t grind into action until it’s asked the right question, and some of my ideas here were straight off the cuff. My comments were, naturally, reduced to a couple of soundbites, but I think some interesting things came up. I’m taking the chance to publish the unexpurgated version of Mark Schilling’s interview with me for his piece last week in Variety.
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