Twitch Film friend Doug Jones has been stalking Hayao Miyazaki throughout his journeys in California, and has gathered together a variety of things that he's said about Ponyo and other works. Some of this will be familiar to those of you who read our write-up of Miyazaki's Comic-Con panel, but there's new stuff too:
“There was a children’s book, aimed for small children, that gave me a bit of a hint at the beginning, and I was thinking of perhaps using that as the original story to work from. There was a frog in that. But as I worked on the story, it became something completely different from that original children’s book, so I didn’t pursue that direction.” (According to Jones, h'es referring to Rieko Nakagawa's Elta the Frog.)
Also noted: there ARE still plans to bring Tales of Earthsea, directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro Miyazaki, to the US. Here's the full question and answer.
“Questio:n Mr. Lasseter, I didn’t realize you had already prepared a version of [Earthsea]. I thought there was a rights issue with the Ursula Le Guin estate. What is the status of that?
Lasseter: We’re just kinda wading through that, and there’s a time limit. It will be released at some point.”
