Hayao Miyazaki's New Animated Film "Is The Realization of an Image That Exceeds Reality"
Hayao Miyazaki is hard at work creating his next big Studio Ghibli film. The legendary animator came out of retirement for this project and there’s no doubt that it’s going to be something magical and special.
The movie is titled How Do You Live? and it’s based on Yoshino Genzaburo's 1937 story about a young boy who moves in with his uncle after the death of his father and undergoes a spiritual change.
The movie “centers on a middle school boy named Honda Junichi. The student lives a quiet life and comes to learn more about adolescence as he exchanges letters with his uncle. The pair grow and learn from one another as Honda grows bored of his pristine life. However, the uncle’s wise words manage to challenge Honda into doing more with his life than what has come to be expected.”
We have some new details to share with you on the film thanks to animator Toshiyuki Inoue. According to Reddit user go-nintendo-1987, Inoue said he believes Miyazaki will finish up his new film by the fall. He also teased Miyazaki’s aesthetics goal, saying:
"What Miyazaki wants is more than just a reproduction of reality. It is the realization of an image that exceeds reality. Takeshi Honda can do that. He saw a partially finished movie. It was exactly Miyazaki's anime, but at the same time Honda's."
The film is “the realization of an image that exceeds reality”, I love that, and I can’t wait to see what that looks like!
Producer Toshio Suzuki previously talked about the project, saying, "The film that Hayao Miyazaki's working on at the moment is a big, fantastical story.” He also shared at the time that Miyazaki was completing 1-minute of animation per month.
"We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we're drawing more frames. So, there are more drawings to draw than before. Back when we were making [1988's] 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.”
There’s no doubt that this movie is going to turn out to be a beautiful work of animation art. I love that they are hand-drawing everything. This traditional form of animation is almost dead. It seems like Miyazaki is really the only one keeping it alive right now.