Studio Ghibli Reveals New Details About Hayao Miyazaki's Next Movie

Anime legend and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hiyao Miyazaki has got a new movie on the way--but it won't be here for a while. Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki has been speaking about Miyazaki's next film, titled How Do You Live? The news comes in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, in which Suzuki discusses the studio adding its catalog to HBO Max and new details on Miyazaki's upcoming movie.

Suzuki calls How Do You Live?, which is based on author Yoshino Genzaburō's 1937 novel of the same name, "a big, fantastical story" about a teenage boy's intellectual and spiritual awakening following his father's death. According to Suzuki, "one of the new approaches" used in How Do You Live?'s creation is a longer production schedule and a larger budget than is typical for a Ghibli movie.

"When Miyazaki came back and said that I want to make a film again, I actually said that's not a great idea because he's achieved so much already," Suzuki says in the interview. "You can't come back and do something that you've already done in the past."

The result is a film that includes "more drawings" to create "more frames" than is usual for Ghibli. Suzuki describes how, even employing "60 animators" to work on How Do You Live?, the studio is "only able to come up with one minute of animation in a month" or 12 minutes per year. "We've been working on this film for three years, so that means we have 36 minutes completed so far," Suzuki says. "We're hoping it will finish in the next three years." Unlike so many other areas of film production, the Ghibli producer also tells EW that the animation studios' progress hasn't been affected by the pandemic so far.

Suzuki also briefly describes the next Ghibli movie by Gorō Miyazaki (Tales from Earthsea; Up on Poppy Hill), Hayao Miyazaki's son, which the producer says is "all done by computer-generated animation" and is "based on a book or a story from England" about "a very wise girl."

As mentioned above, a number of Studio Ghibli's films are set to arrive on HBO Max on May 27--the same day the new streaming service launches.

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