Fans of the celebrated director Hayao Miyazaki queued outside cinemas in Japan early Friday morning to be the first to see the Oscar-winning animator’s first feature film for a decade – and had no idea what to expect.
Speculation about How Do You Live? had been building for months, not least because it is expected to be the last by the 82-year-old, who spent five years making the film after reversing a decision to retire.
His Studio Ghibli – the artistic force behind Spirited Away, for which he won an Oscar in 2003, My Neighbour Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle – took the unusual step of keeping details of the plot secret.
The film, previously described by Ghibli only as a “grand fantasy”, was released with no trailers and publicity limited to a single poster, published last December, showing a sketch of a birdlike creature with white and blue feathers.
While the film’s title was taken from a best-selling 1937 novel by the Japanese children’s author Genzaburo Yoshino, Ghibli stressed that the plot was a Miyazaki original.
A surge in interest in Yoshino’s work among fans trying to decipher clues about Miyazaki’s valedictory anime and its release prompted publishers to issue reprints of the book and a manga adaptation.
The novel also makes an appearance in the 124-minute film, which centres on a boy who moves to the countryside with his father after his mother dies in a fire in wartime Japan. There, he meets a heron who transports him to an alternate universe, where the mystery of his mother’s death is slowly revealed.
“It was a very Ghibli-esque movie,” said Eisaku Kimura, a university student who was among the Miyazaki devotees who had queued outside a cinema in Tokyo’s Shibuya district on Friday morning.
“It’s not like I felt there was anything special about it just because it was his last work, but I definitely saw a lot of Miyazaki in the movie … and it was exciting.”
Valeriia Matveeva, an English teacher from Russia, described How Do You Live? as “a crazy mixture of all the Ghibli movies I’ve seen before”.
“I think it takes the best of it, and I think it’s kind of scary at times but it’s also magical. Because there was no promotion, I had no idea what to think about it, but it was good.”
The film’s producer, Toshio Suzuki, said last month that the studio had decided not to advertise How Do You Live? over concern that the promotions for previous Ghibli anime had verged on excessive.
“I thought giving out too much information would reduce audience interest,” Suzuki said, according to Nikkei Asia. “In this age of information technology, I thought that the lack of information itself would be entertaining.”
After the release of his previous anime, The Wind Rises, in 2013, Miyazaki announced he would no longer make feature-length films, saying his age was beginning to inhibit his perfectionist approach.
But four years later, Ghibli said the director was coming out of retirement to make what would be “his final film, considering his age”.
Miyazaki was nominated for two further Academy Awards – for Howl’s Moving Castle in 2006 and The Wind Rises in 2014 – the same year he was chosen to receive an honorary Oscar.
One fan who had just watched the film at a cinema in Tokyo said the film was the “culmination” of Miyazaki’s anime output.
“I couldn’t digest it all by just watching it once … I feel like I want to watch it again immediately,” he told Kyodo News.
With Agence France-Presse
