An Update On Hayao Miyazaki’s Next Animated Film
Studio Ghibli, and director Hayao Miyazaki in particular, have together produced some of the greatest animated films ever made anywhere. And though Miyazaki has repeatedly announced his retirement, he’s still working on something today at age 79. So after My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, what’s next?
EW.com got on the phone with Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki to find out what they could about the studio’s next project, called “How Do You Live?” Suzuki wasn’t ready to give anything away about the plot, but he could tell them how far along the film was.
“[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,” Suzuki admitted. “That means 12 months a year, you get 12 minutes worth of movie. Actually, we’ve been working on this film for three years, so that means we have 36 minutes completed so far. We’re hoping it will finish in the next three years.”
The scale of Ghibli films has grown over the years. Suzuki says that when they worked on Totoro, they had just eight animators and finished the project in eight months.
The studio is currently working on two different movies simultaneously….one is Miyazaki’s “How Do You Live?” and the other is an untitled project directed by Hayao’s son Goro. “Gorō’s film is based on a book or story from England, and it’s a story about a very wise girl. We’ve only announced it’s going to be a new film, we haven’t announced anything yet. So, that’s as far as I can tell you now.”
The Goro film will also be done with CGI animation, which is a bit of a disappointment, given that no one on Earth puts the craft into 2D like Studio Ghibli. I mean….twelve minutes a year?