Celebrated animated filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki is famed for his meticulous attention to detail. You won’t find any shortcuts taken at his Studio Ghibli, the man himself obsesses over every frame which naturally means the films take some time to get made – but they’re worth it.
Miyazaki had seemingly retired but then came out of it in 2016 to work on the coming-of-age drama “How Do You Live?” which is still in production and is based on Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel. Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki gave an update to EW this week on how the film is progressing and it turns out it is still a good three years away from being completed:
“We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we’re drawing more frames. There are more drawings to draw than before. Back when we were making ‘My Neighbor Totoro,’ we only had eight animators. ‘Totoro’ we made in eight months.
[For] the current film that Miyazaki is working on, we have 60 animators, but we are only able to come up with one minute of animation in a month. 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 hand-drawn work follows a 15-year-old boy who moves into his uncle’s house after his father’s death and Miyazaki is said to be making the new film to leave behind for his grandson:
“It’s his way of saying ‘Grandpa is moving on to the next world, but he’s leaving behind this film.’ Many directors make films on and on and on throughout their careers as they grow older. When Miyazaki came back and said that I want to make a film again, I actually said that’s not a great idea because he’s achieved so much already. You can’t come back and do something that you’ve already done in the past, you have to do something different. One of the ideas that came out from that was, why not spend more time and spend more money [to make a film]? So, that’s one of the new approaches.”
Production has been continuing through the coronavirus pandemic but even so, the earliest the film might wrap is 2023 barring any other complications.
