The Artist's Child

When people learn that I’m Ursula K. Le Guin’s son, assuming that means something to them, I’m nearly always asked if I am a writer. I still don’t know how to answer this question. I don’t write the way my mother wrote, which is how I understand what it means to be a writer. I don’t have the undeniable need. I never developed the discipline.

Did I evade my destiny because “writer” was taken, or was it not my destiny? This question dogs children who don’t follow in successful parents’ footsteps. And while no club of artist’s children exists, that I know of, where we can compare notes on these matters, I’m surely not the only one who would find it instructive to learn the choices others make, to observe our mutual lives in our parents’ shadows.

I am my mother’s literary executor and co-director of a foundation in her name. A few months ago, I used that nepo baby touch—a privilege I exploit sparingly and in the interest of pro-writer programs—to send a fan note to an author whose words have been a lamppost when I’m drunk with despair at the state of the world. Her prompt and kind reply included the sentiment, “It is not always easy to be the child of a writer, or to be a writer with children.” I agree on both counts.

Admiration, love, the competition and desire for parental approval—it is not always easy to be the child of a writer. Or perhaps it is not always easy to be a child. Fortunately, the trope of artists’ children growing up in a milieu of creative neglect and drama had no purchase in my happy, loving childhood. When I was young, my mother was for me a parent first, only incidentally a writer. But as I grew up and her renown increased, things became more complex.

Three decades ago the legendary Japanese animator/filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki wrote my mother to propose adapting her Earthsea series into a film. She had not yet seen work from Studio Ghibli—at that time, few in the U.S. had—and her experience of animation was limited to Disney, which she considered a mostly malignant cultural influence. Over the years, Ursula declined many animation offers from U.S. studios, and she dismissed Mr. Miyazaki’s as well.

Then came My Neighbor Totoro, Ghibli’s 1988 release that made Ursula a fan “at once and forever,” as she wrote in a later blog post. Totoro shares traits with Ursula’s books, including its lack of condescension toward children and a refusal to embrace binary narratives. Through a mutual acquaintance, my mother put the word out that she was open to revisiting the discussion. In 2005 Toshio Suzuki, Ghibli’s president, requested a meeting while the team was en route to the U.S. premiere of Howl’s Moving Castle. Ursula forwarded the email to me with a cover note: “HELP!!! Please be here?????”

Later that year Ursula and I met with Hayao Miyazaki and other members of the Ghibli team in my parents’ living room. Ursula described the meeting to her agent in an email a few hours afterward: “The Earthsea film is to be written and directed by Miyazaki-san’s son Goro. Goro is an unknown quantity, has not made a movie before… . [Theo and I] talked it over and agree that we trust Miyazaki-san not to let an inferior film be produced by his studio… . So at dinner tonight we are going to tell him it’s a go.”

Whether the resulting film is inferior is subjective. In the ongoing clickbait subgenre of “Best and Worst Ghibli Films,” Tales from Earthsea usually ranks worst. I’ve only watched it through twice, and both times it provided a terrible out-of-body experience, like having my mother’s mind snatched and distorted by a stranger.

In any case, the film did not meet Miyazaki père’s standards. You can find an over-memed YouTube video of him walking out of a private screening. After lighting a cigarette, he says to himself, and a hot mic, “You shouldn’t make a picture based on your emotions.” After finishing the cigarette, he returns to the screening, concluding afterward that Goro “hasn’t become an adult.” (“Here is a complicated family dynamic,” Ursula noted early on.)

I’d managed to avoid this video of father throwing son under the bus until I sat down to draft this essay. Watching it, I experienced much the same emotions I did watching Logan Roy tell his children, in the fourth season of Succession, “You’re not serious people.” These are scenes no child of an accomplished parent should watch, in fictional or documentary form. Fears that we don’t measure up to parental expectations require no extra encouragement.

Complicating matters, in Tales from Earthsea a young prince murders his father, the King of Enlad, a scene that does not exist in the book. In an interview, Goro denied any symbolism to this, but I’ve always assumed that the parricide influenced his father’s reaction. At the same time, Hayao Miyazaki wasn’t wrong. The film is not very good.

I assume Miyazaki knew that Goro had taken license with Ursula’s, and his own, ideas and moral sensibilities. The film looks like Earthsea, but isn’t true to the books’ story or rules. It feels like a Studio Ghibli film, but isn’t quite true to that world either. It’s not so much that you shouldn’t make a picture based on your emotions—on what else should you base a picture?—but you shouldn’t make a picture based on emotions and inflict it on someone else’s artwork. While anything’s game for an auteur director, adaptation remains a delicate trust.

Although initially Ursula was gracious (in a terse way) about the film, Goro’s public assertion that she approved of the film eventually goaded her to make a frank public statement describing the whole experience as a “bitter disappointment.” I, meanwhile, spent a decade feeling guilty about having encouraged the adaptation. The guilt has faded, but I still feel badly for Ursula, for viewers of the film, for the Ghibli artists who painted such beautiful backgrounds for such a mediocre product.

I also have empathy for Goro. How would it have gone if Ursula had urged me to write a book, then publicly declared I was not a serious writer? But I do not feel badly for Hayao Miyazaki. He committed a painful bait and switch, shoving an under-prepared son into a role he himself had committed to fill, and ultimately breaking his promise to my mother that he would only release the film if it met his standards.

All of this is was a long time ago. Control of Studio Ghibli recently transferred to Nippon TV. Most press accounts say that Miyazaki and Suzuki repeatedly tried to persuade Goro to take over the studio. Goro declined, saying, “It is better to leave it to somebody else.”

At first, the prospect of the studio in the hands of strangers depressed me. Despite my experiences, I too remain a once-and-forever Studio Ghibli fan. And as the steward of an artist estate, the idea of creative control sitting with a corporation is terrifying. I expect we’ll see a period of reverence for Hayao Miyazaki’s legacy, followed by decades of franchise expansion that divests the studio of its spirit.

And yet, I get it. I’m not sure it’s better for the rest of us that Studio Ghibli left the Miyazaki family. But it may be better for Goro.