Hayao Miyazaki’s final film hits theaters this week — but you’d never know it
Hayao Miyazaki, the master filmmaker behind Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke, was all set to retire from his company Studio Ghibli and the animation world after his 2013 film The Wind Rises. But when you love to work… you work. So in 2016, despite calling it quits, Miyazaki revealed he was back at it on one last movie: How Do You Live?. Details were sparse and production was slow — in 2020, Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki said only 36 minutes of the planned feature film were completed since production began three years prior — but anyone familiar with Miyazaki’s painstaking work knew How Do You Live? would be worth the wait whenever it finally rolled around.
Well, good news: It has rolled around. It’s finally here. Like, this week.
There are no trailers for How Do You Live?. There are no promotional images or loglines. Miyazaki has done zero press for the film, and according to Suzuki, the 86-year-old animator has no plans to do so. The closest thing there is to hype are cryptic tweets from the Ghibli Twitter account teasing audio output.
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How Do You Live? opens in Japan this Friday, July 14, with zero fanfare. This is, according to Ghibli, exactly the plan.
According to translations of a recent interview Suzuki gave with the Japanese magazine Bungei Shunji in June, the reason for the media blackout is simply that Miyazaki and the Ghibli team want the film to do all the talking. In theory, if there’s a new Miyazaki film playing in theaters, audiences will seek it out — so why give anything more away? Bold move, but the pedigree is there: Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Ponyo are all among the highest-grossing films to ever be released in Japan.
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