A new spell is about to be cast. In news reported by The New York Times, Hayao Miyazaki will be creating a brand new Studio Ghibli movie. The last new Studio Ghibli movie, according to the publication. And one we are all excited to see take shape.
The article offers us a glimpse at the film, saying:
Neither Miyazaki nor Suzuki will share much about the forthcoming film, beyond the fact that it is based on a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino. The story concerns a 15-year-old boy in Tokyo, small for his age and fond of mischief, whose father has recently died. In the English translation by Bruno Navasky, published in October, the boy gazes out at the city and is overwhelmed: “The watching self, the self being watched, and furthermore the self becoming conscious of all this, the self observing itself by itself, from afar, all those various selves overlapped in his heart, and suddenly he began to feel dizzy.”
The actual content of the film could be anything — Suzuki has described it as “fantasy on a grand scale” — since Miyazaki doesn’t so much borrow stories as liberate them from their origins. (In the pseudobiographical “The Wind Rises,” he gives the real-life Jiro Horikoshi a fictional wife dying of tuberculosis.) All Suzuki will share is that he recognizes himself in one of the characters, who is not human.
Miyazaki’s works deal with many themes, popular among them coming-of-age narratives and discussions of nature vs. man. Fantasy always serves to heighten the aspects of reality that we can all understand. And, of course, incredibly intricate animation that soothes and moves us ties it all together. If this film will offer us something even grander than before, then it will truly astound.
Though the 1937 novel goes unnamed in the article, it appears Miyazaki will adapt How Do You Live? While this news appears to have released in some capacity at previous times, this feels like a formalization of intent. The book has long influenced Miyazaki, who cites it as his favorite childhood read.
The new Miyazaki movie, tentatively titled, How Do You Live, has also set its release date. It will arrive in Japan on July 14, 2023. In the US, the movie will be titled “The Boy and the Heron” and will arrive “later this year,” per its North American distributor GKids.
The movie released a poster in December 2022, but recently revealed that there would be no other images or trailers released to tease fans. We’ll be going into Miyazaki’s How Do You Live without any more information.
But will this truly be Miyazaki’s last film? Of course, Miyazaki has famously announced retirement before, only to return. Well, only time will tell. Miyazaki’s producer and partner Suzuki has only this insight, which the article shares. “In the West, we always need to know how things end. At Ghibli, the last scene is often a mystery.”
We look forward to this next great adventure.
Originally published on November 23, 2021.
