Goro Miyazaki

• 1. Introduction

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  Goro Miyazaki entered his first completed film's premiere on the 28th of June 2006 with the weight of an impossible name. His father, Hayao Miyazaki, was in the audience. The two had barely spoken throughout the entire making of Tales from Earthsea. Hayao had believed his son lacked the experience to direct at all. What happened after the screening that night would shape everything that followed for Goro: his father delivered a message saying the film was made honestly and that it was good. That sentence carried years of silence.

  Goro was born on the 21st of January 1967 in Tokyo to two animators. He grew up in a household of drawings and movement, found his parents' sketches as a child, and then deliberately walked away from all of it. He chose soil over celluloid, parks over story reels. Yet by the time he was in his forties, he had directed three feature films and a television series, overseen the design of two of Japan's most beloved cultural landmarks, and carved out a place entirely his own inside one of animation's most storied studios. How someone arrives at that position by refusing to follow the expected path is worth understanding.

• 2. The Landscape Architect

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  Shinshu University's School of Agriculture is where Goro chose to study after high school, a decision that said everything about what he was stepping away from. As a teenager he had already concluded he would never reach the level his father had attained. Rather than spend a career falling short of that standard, he redirected entirely toward landscape architecture.

  After graduating, he worked as a construction consultant focused on planning and designing parks and gardens. The discipline rewards patience, spatial thinking, and a long view of how people move through built environments. Those are not skills typically associated with animation, but they are exactly what the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka would demand. In 1998, Goro joined the design of that museum, and by 2001 he had become its director, a post he held until June 2005. Ghibli Park, which began operating in 2022, extended that work into an even larger project, with Goro serving as its lead designer and director. The path through horticulture and park planning turned out to be a long preparation for something the source of his ambivalence had built.

• 3. A Reluctant Director

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  Tales from Earthsea began as Goro's assignment to draw storyboards, not to direct. He had joined the adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea book series as a consultant. Producer Toshio Suzuki saw the storyboards and decided the man who drew them should make the film. That decision set a collision in motion.

  Hayao Miyazaki opposed his son directing on the grounds of inexperience. The friction between them was serious enough that the two reportedly did not speak during the film's entire development. Goro, despite that silence, pushed the project through to completion. The screenplay was written by Goro and Keiko Niwa, and the film featured Junichi Okada, Bunta Sugawara, and Aoi Teshima in starring roles.

  When the film opened in Japan on the 29th of July 2006, it earned positive notices from some quarters but drew mixed comparisons to other Studio Ghibli releases. It grossed $68 million worldwide. At the close of that same year, it also received Japan's Bunshun Raspberry Award for both Worst Movie and Worst Director. The film was nominated the following year for the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year, losing to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and it appeared in the Out of Competition section at the 63rd Venice Film Festival. Toshio Suzuki's gamble on an untested director produced a film that divided audiences and critics alike, but it also produced a director.

• 4. Finding His Footing

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  From Up on Poppy Hill arrived in 2011 and came from a different place entirely. The source material was Kokurikozaka kara, a manga by Chizuru Takahashi and Tetsuro Sayama published in 1980. The screenplay was written by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, which marked a notable shift: father and son were now collaborators rather than adversaries.

  Goro also took on a small performance role, voicing the world history teacher character, and he wrote lyrics for some of the songs used in the film. The cast included Masami Nagasawa, Keiko Takeshita, Yuriko Ishida, Jun Fubuki, Takashi Naito, Shunsuke Kazama, Nao Omori, and Teruyuki Kagawa. Released in Japan on the 16th of July 2011, it opened to positive reviews and went on to win the 2012 Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year. That prize represented a clean reversal of the critical outcome of his debut, and it came from the same awarding body that had previously nominated and passed over his first film.

• 5. New Forms, New Ground

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  On the 31st of January 2014, an announcement confirmed that Goro would direct his first anime television series. The project was Ronja, the Robber's Daughter, an adaptation of Astrid Lindgren's novel Ronia, the Robber's Daughter, produced for NHK. The animation was handled by Polygon Pictures, with Studio Ghibli serving as co-producer. The series ran for 26 episodes over a single season from 2014 to 2015, marking a full departure from the theatrical format Goro had worked in until then.

  Earwig and the Witch followed a different path still. In May 2020, producer Toshio Suzuki confirmed the new project was in development. Studio Ghibli announced on the 3rd of June 2020 that it would adapt the novel Earwig and the Witch by Diana Wynne Jones, and that it would be the studio's first full 3D CG animated feature. The film had its world premiere on the 18th of October 2020 at the Lumiere Film Festival. It then premiered on Japanese television on the 30th of December 2020 on NHK General TV, before Toho released it theatrically in Japan on the 27th of August 2021. In that sense, each of Goro's four directing credits has arrived through a distinct format: theatrical adaptation, theatrical collaboration, television series, and CG television-to-theatrical release. His later role as executive producer on The Boy and the Heron in 2023 extended his presence at Ghibli into a new kind of contribution.