In the razzmatazz that has greeted the big releases of the last fortnight, Mission: Impossible and Barbie, a far more interesting event has passed almost unnoticed in the west. A film with virtually no advance publicity had fans in Japan queueing around the block, taking $17.5m (£13.5m) in its first weekend.
How Do You Live? is a new anime by the revered director Hayao Miyazaki, who reversed an earlier decision to retire for what he has intimated will be his final full-length film. Until the eve of its opening, when a free-to-use illustration was released, the film’s only publicity was a single poster, published last year. It showed a crayon sketch of what – given the film’s stated debt to a 1937 novel by the Japanese children’s author Genzaburo Yoshino – was surmised to be a blue and white heron.
