Trailer for Gedo Senki (Tales of Earthsea)

Gedo Senki Trailer (5:00 - 173mb)

This video is made available courtesy of Peter at GhibliWorld, and he has my deepest thanks. Pay him a visit and send some words of gratitude. Domo arigatou.

The theatrical trailer for Studio Ghibli's upcoming Gedo Senki premiered today on Japanese television. This is an eagerly anticipated film, not the least because Hayao Miyazaki's son, 39-year-old Goro, is directing (this is his first film).

The three-minute trailer is quite promising, but it also confirms a suspicion of mine. The real drama isn't going to be the story of the movie itself, but the private conflicts among the Miyazaki clan. The trailer, in a sense, feels like a collage of Miyazaki's greatest hits, from Nausicaa to the World Masterpiece Theatre days. Clearly, Goro is openly grappling with his own identity, his family relationships, and what it means to be the son of Japan's biggest filmmaker.

Father Miyazaki became an amazingly prolific animator and filmmaker, but his legendary workaholism came at a personal cost. His wife, Akemi Ota, had to sacrifice her career as an animator (she was part of that legendary gang from Toei Doga that unleashed Horus, Prince of the Sun) to raise their children, and Hayao, to a great extent, missed out on his sons' childhood.

Goro, according to his online dairies at Ghibli, was reluctant to follow his parents into animation; a recent entry details his mother's long objections, and his father has bitterly opposed his directing Gedo Senki, to the point that the two keep a measure of distance (it's helpful that Hayao directed three short films for the Ghibli Museum). Goro has yet to really make peace with his father, and that's something that really surprised me. His diary entry yesterday noted, "Hayao Miyazaki, for me, gets 0 points as father, full marks as director."

So, the movie promises to be really great fun (there's so much talent at Ghibli, how could it go wrong?), but we're really here to watch the family drama. It seems impossible for me to seperate the two. But this is to be expected; if Goro is being annointed as successor to the studio, without any real experience, he'll need to pass his test of fire.