Earthsea: A feud that animated Japanese film

Adapting Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books was supposedly going to be a dream come true for Hayao Miyazaki. In the end it was a project that, for Miyazaki at least, turned into a disaster when his son Goro was handed the director's chair. The feud between the pair enthralled Japan, highlighting as it did the divide in Japan's manga community between traditionalists and a new generation brought up on anime.

Hayao Miyazaki is often referred to as Japan's Walt Disney, such is the mastery of his manga movies. Miyazaki and his colleague Isao Takahata founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, and since the release of Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989, the films of Studio Ghibli directed by either of the duo have topped the annual cinema box-office takings in Japan – even Titanic was sunk by Princess Mononoke. Their films pay homage to the origins of manga in Japanese woodblock prints in the 18th century before the term manga was hijacked by anime films such as Akira in the late 1980s.

When Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata founded Studio Ghibli they made it a point of honour to say that they made animation cinema and not anime. In 1988 when Miyazake was making his classic cartoon My Neighbour Totoro, cinemas around the world were being wowed by Katsuhiro Otomo's anime classic, Akira.

Akira, set in a futuristic military controlled Neo-Tokyo, features motorcycle-riding cyber-punks racing through the streets fighting rival gangs to the death. The success of Akira led to the popular misconception, especially in English-speaking countries, that the word manga refers to Japanese anime films involving street gangs and irresponsible kids, such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

Manga in fact refers to comic drawings that are whimsical in nature. More precisely, manga refers to an aesthetic style of drawing that was established shortly after the Second World War when the creative look of the great 19th-century Japanese woodprint artist Katsushika Hokusai was meshed with the cartoon style of Hanna-Barbera and the geometric lines of East European animators such as Jan Svankmajer. That look, of bold primary colours, simple geometric-shaped bodies and comic-strip effects where the hands, eyes and nose are drawn in an exaggerated manner, still dominates manga today.

In the early Sixties, manga made a transfer from page to screen through the television work of Tezuka Osamu. His manga shows told stories of all genres, from action adventures to sci-fi and drama. His series Astro-Boy jetted manga from a niche market into mainstream Japanese culture. So when Akira and its anime clones threatened to hijack the term manga, it made companies such as Studio Ghibli all the more determined to show the wide spectrum of manga that exists.

Instead of films where confrontations between youth gangs were paramount, the founders of Studio Ghibli wanted to make films that told stories with responsible, magical protagonists at the fore. In the process their company became the biggest manga movie studio in the world.

The lack of conflict in the films immediately differentiated Studio Ghibli pictures from anime and also the work of modern American animation films created by companies such as Pixar and Disney. It was this brand of manga that persuaded Le Guin, who had always turned her nose up at offers to turn her Earthsea books into an animated film, to sign away the rights to the books.

Hiyao Miyazaki had first approached the author to make a film of Earthsea 20 years ago. The Earthsea books are, he says, always kept on his bedside table and he even wrote a treatment for the film, titled Shuna's Journey. But Le Guin, as she had done with Disney and Watership Down director Martin Rosen, turned him down. Le Guin's refusal was based on the fact that she believed that the "Disneyfication" of cartoons in the Fifties had made animated films more concerned with commerce than entertainment.

She changed her mind after watching My Neighbour Totoro, Miyazaki's film about two sisters who move to a new house to be closer to their mother who is ill in hospital. The sisters get lost in a nearby forest where they discover creatures called totoros who embody the spirit of the plant and trees. What set Studio Ghibli's methods apart was that, while most manga or Hollywood animations would have evil adults, scary monsters or fight scenes, this movie just allows us to sample the wonders of this magical universe through the eyes of two inquisitive innocents.

The style and the characters in Totoro, as they are in the Earthsea books, are versed in the traditions of enchantment. It was a film that harked back to the golden age of Disney in the 1930s when the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein visited Walt Disney and wrote a book on the studio in which he waxed lyrical about the possibilities of metamorphosis and the perpetual transformations and use of animation.

Le Guin was excited about the prospect of Studio Ghibli making an adaptation for the same reasons that Eisenstein loved Disney. Then it was announced that Goro Miyazaki was to take the reins of the manga film and the first-time director decided that he wanted to make Earthsea a more anime-style film so that it was more in tune with the sensibility of the younger generation. It was a decision that would infuriate both his father and the author.

At first, the appointment of Goro Miyazaki had looked like a classic case of nepotism. Miyazaki had no experience in making animation films: before directing Tales from Earthsea he was an architect who worked on the Studio Ghibli museum that opened in 2001. His father had made his first manga feature, The Castle of Cagliostro, aged 38 and now his son, who had just turned 38, was being asked to make his own directorial bow.

Le Guin tried to protest, but Hayao Miyazaki informed her that at 66 he was too old to take on such a big project and rumours of his retirement began to circulate. In acquiescing to the decision to use the novice director, Le Guin made Hayao promise that he would oversee his son's every move. However, once production began it soon became clear that father and son didn't see eye to eye.

When Hayao discovered that his son was going to go against the ethos of the most successful manga cinema studio and make an anime-style film he tried to get his son removed from the director's chair. Goro began writing an on-set blog criticising his father and claiming he was trying to sabotage the film. He even revealed that Hayao didn't think his son was sufficiently versed in the manga tradition or in animation technique and apparently tried to get the Studio Ghibli staff to strike in protest.

I met Goro Miyazaki after a screening of the film and he revealed that the relationship had not healed, even though Tales from Earthsea was the most successful film in Japan last year. He even suggested that the lack of a relationship with his father had helped him to establish his own vision on the film. He explained, "I do not have much of a relationship with my father and because of that I've never felt in his shadow. He didn't spend much time with our family when I was young. He used to work all day. So when I was a child he used to come home when I was already asleep and when I went to school in the morning he was the one who was asleep.

"There was only one time that my father supported me in the making of the film. He gave me a picture that was his original drawing of the town that we see in the film. After that gesture he changed his mind and not only did not support my vision but actively interfered with the production. In making the film and following the characters I tried to use reason as the motivation, whereas my father, he makes films that investigate emotion."

The open warfare between the pair even found its way on to the screen. Tales From Earthsea starts with a scene in which Prince Arren kills his father, an act of patricide that does not feature in Le Guin's book. It was the Tales from Earthsea director's way of signalling that this film was not in the manga traditional of his father. The person left unhappiest by the battles, however, is the author of the books. The film is nothing like what one would have anticipated from the studio behind such classics as Spirited Away and Grave of the Fireflies.

Although Le Guin never did get to see her dream of Hayao Miyazake bringing his crowd-pleasing brand of manga to her books, a postscript to the whole episode is that the legendary director has announced that rumours of his retirement have been premature. He is making a new film, Ponyo on the Cliff. Indeed, he may even use it as an opportunity to gain some revenge on his son: he has revealed that the five-year-old protagonist will be based on his son Goro at the same age.

Many manga fans are hoping that it will also be a return to Ghibli's more traditional animation and that this current infiltration of anime into the studio's oeuvre was only a minor blot on its copybook.

'Tales from Earthsea' is out now