Hayao Miyazaki Has Almost Completed His Next Movie

Hayao Miyazaki’s next animated film is officially titled “How Do You Live?” It was originally supposed to be ready by 2020 in unison with the Tokyo Olympics, but delays have resorted the filmmaker to continue working on his new film, with still no release date in tow.

A New York Times piece on Miyazaki reads like the launch of a campaign for the film. The article offers us a glimpse at what to expect:

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.

Though the 1937 novel goes unnamed in the article, it appears Miyazaki will adapt the novel “How Do You Live?” The book has long influenced Miyazaki, who cites it as his favorite childhood read.

In 2013 Miyazaki said he was retiring and that his last film would be the bittersweet WWII drama “The Wind Rises.” That retirement was short-lived though as he is clearly set to release another film.

Where many animators might overtly simplify the visual elements of their animated movies, Miyazaki has always adhered to a painstakingly difficult process. Miyazaki had previously stated that they were working at a pace of animating about one minute of “How Do You Live?” per month. But last year his producer said in an interview that COVID has actually caused them to work faster with the animators working from home and the film was half finished.

My guess is to expect a 2023 release for “How do You Live?”

The legendary Japanese director of such classics as “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke,”and “My Neighbor Totoro” has always been suspicious of computers and personally draws his own frames by hand, which number in the thousands per film. As a result, Miyazaki’s films have always been richly conceived, with beautiful lavish colors and a masterful sense of detail rarely seen in western animation.