Top animator shuns hi-tech
Hong Kong's favourite Japanese animation master, Hayao Miyazaki, has vowed to continue making films with traditional drawing skills rather than computer technology.
Miyazaki was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, the first time the honour has been bestowed on a director of animated films.
'I thank [the Venice Film Festival] for the award and we will follow the road [of traditional drawings]. We started this before the invention of this new technology,' he said.
US film director Tim Burton, who was in Venice to present his latest puppet animation The Corpse Bride, said: 'He's amazing. In the United States people claimed that drawing [animation] is dead because of computers, but thank God, there's still him doing it.'
Miyazaki's appearance on the famed Lido was one of the highlights of the festival's heavy Asian focus, alongside the films by Hong Kong directors to open and close the film festival.
Miyazaki, whose Spirited Away won an Oscar for best animated film and a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, earned loud applause from fans at the Sala Grande theatre. The audience stood up four times to cheer for the director's triumph. It was said that such an enthusiastic reaction had not been seen before at the festival.
Despite the fact the full list of award winners at the festival had not been announced, actor-turned-director George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck had already been selected for the international critics' prize for films in competition, sources said.
While in the race for the festival's top award, the Golden Lion, Clooney's political feature and South Korean director Park Chan-wook's controversial cult drama Sympathy for Lady Vengeance were said to be at the top of the list.
Hong Kong director Peter Chan Ho-sun, together with Taiwanese-Japanese star Takeshi Kaneshiro, mainland star Zhou Xun and South Korean heartthrob Ji Jin-hee, arrived at the Lido on Friday to present Perhaps Love, the festival's closing film.
A reception for the film was held at the Excelsior Hotel after the film's first press screening, which earned applause and cheering from a house full of international film critics and journalists. Wei Wei, the leading actress of Fei Mu's 1948 classic Spring in a Small Town, made a surprise appearance at the reception.
