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.
Extraordinarily for a notoriously leaky industry, not a single drop of plot or character detail (both reportedly independent of the book) had escaped from what was described by Mr Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli only as a “grand fantasy”. The film’s UK and US releases are probably more than a year away, but word from Japan was that it is “very Ghibli‑esque”. This compliment loses nothing in translation, since Studio Ghibli is up there with Pixar and Marvel as being its own global benchmark, with its own gently charming aesthetic, passionate fanbase and museum.
Set up by Mr Miyazaki in 1985 with fellow director Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, the studio created an international foothold by going into partnership with Disney, while protecting itself from Disneyfication with a strict “no edits” policy that has been more or less obeyed.
Mr Miyazaki’s own films include the Oscar‑winning Spirited Away; Howl’s Moving Castle; and the early cult hit, My Neighbor Totoro, which found a whole new audience in the UK last year after being adapted into a multi award‑winning stage show. His son, Goro Miyazaki, has since joined the studio, with adaptations of novels by Ursula K Le Guin and Diana Wynne Jones. The latter was the studio’s first full length venture into computer generated imagery.
Explaining the absence of advance publicity for How Do You Live?, Mr Suzuki said: “In this age of information technology, I thought that the lack of information itself would be entertaining.” It is, of course, not quite as simple as that: the paucity of information unleashed viral flights of blue herons across social media. The studio also laid down a powerful sentimental lure with the suggestion that this would be Mr Miyazaki’s final film. Though this may indeed be the case, given that he is 82 and it has taken him more than five years to animate this film, he has cried wolf several times before.
At a time when the international film industry is floundering in a perfect storm of unfeasible cost-to-box-office ratios, cinema audiences yet to return to pre-Covid levels, and striking writers and actors, the real lesson of the quiet success of How Do You Live? might be that a unique vision such as Mr Miyazaki’s offers unique solutions. The enormous success of anime in general, and its own ardent following in particular, gave Studio Ghibli the bespoke option of excising marketing costs, which can amount to as much as 50% of a film’s budget. It is not a strategy that would work for everyone.
