Hayao Miyazaki’s “final” film will be released with no promotion of any kind in Japan

All we'll get from How Do You Live? is the title and one previously released teaser poster

By Sam Barsanti  |  June 5, 2023 | 8:09pm
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Hayao Miyazaki’s “final” film will be released with no promotion of any kind in Japan
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Hayao Miyazaki in 2014 Photo: Frazer Harrison

In what may be one of the coolest moves ever, Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki confirmed to Japanese magazine Bungei Shunji (via The Hollywood Reporter) that they will be doing no promotion for Hayao Miyazaki’s upcoming film How Do You Live? beyond a teaser poster that was shared online back in December. There will be no trailers, no additional preview images, no plot summary, no cast announcement, no TV commercials, no print ads, nothing. All we have, and all we will have until How Do You Live? comes out in Japan on July 14, is this cool picture of a bird, the title, and the insistence that—despite sharing a title and some sort of mysterious plot inspiration—the movie is not a direct adaptation of the 1937 book of the same name about a teenage boy in Tokyo dealing with the recent death of his father.

Oh wait, there is something else we know about it: It’s directed by Hayao freakin’ Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke), one of the greatest filmmakers alive (animation or otherwise), and it will supposedly be his “final” film. Now, he has said that before about other films, but Miyazaki is in his 80s and this seems to be a movie about death, so it’s probably fair to actually trust him this time.

Either way, that’s all what makes this so damn cool. You shouldn’t need any promotion for this other than knowing what it’s called (so you can buy tickets!) and knowing that it’s most likely the final film from one of the world’s best filmmakers, and it’s a badass move for Studio Ghibli to publicly and explicitly recognize that—at least for the Japanese release, which is happening before any other places.

Suzuki did have a little more to say about this move, noting that there’s an unnamed “American movie” also coming out this summer where “they’ve made three trailers for it” and “if you watch all three, you know everything that’s going to happen in that movie,” and he figures that there must be people who will simply choose not to bother seeing the movie after they’ve seen all of those trailer, so he “wanted to do the opposite of that.” (Suzuki was too polite to say what movie he’s talking about, but a lot of American movies coming out this summer have had three trailers…)

The catch to all of this is that most of the world does not live in Japan and therefore may end up hearing or seeing something from this movie before getting to see it.

 
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