Studio Ghibli’s final film with acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki has almost finished, ahead of schedule.
As reported by The Film Stage, Studio Ghibli president Koji Hoshino updated fans that the upcoming film, titled How Do You Live?, has “progressed very smoothly.” However, Hoshino didn’t provide an expected release date for Miyazaki’s final film. “We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we’re drawing more frames,” producer Toshio Suzuki said.
How Do You Live? features a larger animation team than Studio Ghibli has ever worked with before. “Back when we were making [1988’s] My Neighbor Totoro, we only had eight animators. Totoro we made in eight months,” Suzuki said. “[For] the current film that Hayao Miyazaki is working on, we have 60 animators, but we are only able to come up with one minute of animation in a month.”
Is How Do You Live Really Miyazaki’s Last Film?
While How Do You Live? was confirmed to be Miyazaki’s last film before retiring, fans have heard that before. The Japanese director first retired in the late 1990s but returned to direct 2002’s Spirited Away, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Spirited Away became the first, and so far only, non-English-language movie to win the accolade. Miyazaki came out of retirement again to help plan Earwig and the Witch, Studio Ghibli’s first CG film. Instead of directing, Miyazaki’s son Goro agreed to the job.
Announced in October 2017, How Do You Live? is the film adaptation of Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel of the same name. In October 2021, the novel received its first English translation, with Neil Gaiman writing the foreword. “I’m so glad Mr. Miyazaki is making his film because it means that 84 years after it was written, Yoshino’s novel can be read in English, in Bruno Navasky’s gentle and winning translation, and that I got to read it,” Gaiman wrote.
The official summary of the How Do You Live? novel introduces the protagonist, 15-year-old Copper, who is dealing with his father’s untimely death. “[Copper is] gazing out over his hometown of Tokyo, watching the thousands of people below, and beginning to ponder life’s big questions. How many people are in the world? What do their lives look like? Are humans really made of molecules? The book moves between Copper’s story and his uncle’s journal entries, in which he gives advice and helps Copper learn pivotal truths about the way the world works.”
Most of Studio Ghibli’s film library is available to stream on HBO Max.
Source: The Film Stage
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