Japan director fights to get out of father's shadow

TOKYO, Oct 3 (Reuters) Fans of Japan's distinctive style of full-length animated films gave a standing ovation at this year's Venice Film Festival to the latest movie from Japan's famed Studio Ghibli.

The applause that greeted the presentation of ''Gedo Senki'' -- ''Tales of Earthsea'' in English -- reinforced the success of a film which topped charts in Japan for over a month.

All this was heady stuff for neophyte director Goro Miyazaki, the eldest son of Hayao Miyazaki, Japan's most famous animator and creator of the Academy Award-winning movie ''Spirited Away''.

Yet Miyazaki was not accompanied to Venice by his proud father, a telling sign of the deep rivalry between the two men as the younger Miyazaki struggles to make his mark as a director.

Even more symbolic, perhaps, is the film's shocking opening scene in which a frustrated young prince stabs his father to death -- a scene not without personal resonance for the 39-year-old Goro.

''For Hayao Miyazaki, now that I've made one movie, as far as he's concerned I've become a sort of rival,'' Mr Goro said in an interview at Ghibli headquarters in western Tokyo, referring to his father by his full name throughout an hour-long chat.

His father fiercely opposed the plan to have his son direct ''Gedo Senki'', based on the internationally renowned ''Earthsea'' series of fantasy books by Ursula K Le Guin.

''To have somebody inexperienced like me suddenly make an almost two-hour movie was something he could only think of as reckless, something that would profane the animation,'' Mr Goro said.

Mr Goro has described his childhood as a time when his busy father was almost never at home.

''From the time I became aware of things up to the present, we have almost never talked,'' Goro wrote in an Internet diary entry titled ''Zero Points as a Father, Top Points as a Director''.

In another entry, he described how he realised in junior high school that the only way to understand his father was through his movies.

As a child, Mr Goro was interested in animation himself but quickly abandoned ideas of a career in the field.

''I knew I probably didn't have his talent for drawing or animation,'' he said. ''If I did the same thing as him, of course I'd be compared. So I thought I'd choose a different path,'' he said.

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