Forum - View topicNEWS: Studio Ghibli Appoints Kiyofumi Nakajima as New President
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CANimeFan88
Posts: 346 |
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Does this mean Studio Ghibli will have a future after the passing of Hayao Miyazaki?
I'd really like to see more of what this studio might still have to offer since it has made quite an impact on the history of animation. |
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EricJ2
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They've put a good choice in his old Ghibli Museum post, but I smell trouble putting a museum person in charge of a studio--
The need to "preserve" the previous legacy is exactly what went wrong with Disney for twenty years after Walt's death, when the mantra of the Ron Miller era was "What Would Walt Do?" And the answer, apparently, was that he'd remake Jungle Book and Mary Poppins over and over, since those were the last studio hits, and make comedies that looked like they came from 1966, all the way into the early 80's. When John Lasseter came on after Michael Eisner, Lasseter was still a lifelong-influenced fan, but he had the independent Pixar experience to ask "How would Walt tell a story like he did in the old-fashioned days?" That was a question you could come up with all-new answers to. Arietty and Mary proved that they have good "old-style" Ghibli directors who can do good Ghibli movies for a mainstream audience without remaking Wind Rises, Mononoke and Princess Kaguya over and over, but they first need to get past that idea that a studio was one man. |
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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Most likely the museum would stay open but Ghibli would probably only do sporadic animated productions, and most of them would be co-productions or as financing partners like they did with "Red Turtle."
I think the days of having a stable 2-D animation company set up mainly for theatrical features like Ghibli are pretty much over. Especially a company that is TRYING to make life easier and more economically stable for its employees. That sort of thing is an anomaly. Historically, production companies are set up for one film and then dissolved after the feature is completed and in theaters. The Disney and Ghibli experiments are anomalies. Disney was the ONLY long-term animated production company in the West that produced animated features for decades. The production system in Japan, as I understand it, is very fierce and cut-throat with production funds and that's a good chunk of why they're still making hand-drawn animated features over there. They've controlled their production costs; they didn't do this in the US and we know where hand-drawn features in America ended up -- in the dustbin of history next to Old West TV series! Animators don't get paid well, period, in Japan. Ghibli tried to create a campus atmosphere and provide decent housing but as I understand it Takahata and Miyazaki wanted to retire and the last few features didn't do as well. They did not try THAT HARD to cultivate/mentor successors and that's why Ghibli is where it is now. Some of their protege directors left Ghibli before they shut down and of course there's "controversy" because these guys and the SAME character designers that worked at Ghibli are producing movies that look like Ghibli films! We'll see how that works... If the films aren't good, the public will figure it out. IF they are decent, those guys will stick around but it still won't be entirely like Ghibli. What people seem to miss is that the budgets on the last few Ghibli features exploded from $30million allegedly spent on Princess Mononoke in 1997 to almost $65million-$80million on Takahata's and Miyazaki's last feature films. The films directed by their "proteges" did fine and were profitable but much less so than say Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle. THAT was the problem... Oh, and Takahata's last film, The Tale of Princess of Kaguya, was horribly over-budget and didn't make a profit in Japan. It was still a decent film but it probably cost at least twice to make what it really should have and that impacted its ability to make money (which Hollywood still doesn't seem to get). That's key -- the Japanese are NOT like Hollywood and like to be profitable in Japan. The home video sales are very important, too, but I think they're realistic that they won't get THAT MUCH money from ticket sales abroad and the home video licensing for foreign sales (tickets and home video streaming/disc sales) can provide decent money but it's still not going to be immediately beneficial like having a hit in the home country, either. Ghibli seemed at least reticent and semi-sad about letting the full-time production crew go. I know from secondhand stories a LOT of ex-Disney people were VERY, VERY bitter towards the Disney admin and members of the public who were BIG Disney fans virtually spit on Michael Eisner around the time of the traditional studio shutdown. That guy went being among Disney's most succesful CEO's to the most despised executive officer in the history of that company by the end of his employment at that company... |
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