Hayao Miyazaki’s latest, How Do You Live?, “nearing completion”

It’s been a long life. Don’t we deserve some good news? Thankfully, we have a modest morsel of positivity to end the week on. Hayao Miyazaki’s upcoming final feature is inching toward completion, per The Film Stage. At a press conference for the new Ghibli Park in Japan, Studio Ghibli president Koji Hoshino said that Miyazki’s film, How Do You Live?, has “progressed very smoothly” and “it seems that it is nearing completion.”

“Ghibli has been in a very difficult situation for the last three years due to the coronavirus,” Hoshino said. “I think there was a difficult situtation where we were wondering how to overcome this crisis, but like everyone else, the situation is gradually showing signs of improvement.”

Hoshino said that Miyazaki insists, “This time is the last.” The director previously declared his 2013 masterpiece The Wind Rises as his final work but came out of retirement for How Do You Live? Based on a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino, a childhood favorite of Miyazaki, How Do You Live? follows a 15-year-old boy in Tokyo mourning the death of his father. His loss, coupled with the overwhelming atmosphere of Tokyo, sends the boy into an existential crisis. Yes, this does sound like a Miyazaki film.

In March 2021, Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki told Sight And Sound that the film was about half-done and that the completed work would run 125 minutes. He also noted that Hayao nearly directed Earwig And The Witch before the producer convinced him to take on How Do You Live?

As mentioned, this is but a morsel. However, any news about a new Miyazaki movie is worth knowing about. Even better, we could be seeing a new Miyazaki sooner than we think. Though, like his other movies, How Do You Live? is hand drawn, so it’s probably better not to rush these things.

“We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we’re drawing more frames,” Suzuki told EW in 2020. “So, there are more drawings to draw than before. Back when we were making My Neighbor Totoro, we only had eight animators. Totoro we made in eight months. [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. That means 12 months a year, you get 12 minutes worth of movie.”