Earlier this year, UK Netflix subscribers got a major treat on the streaming service – the (near) complete works of Studio Ghibli, from Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind, right through to When Marnie Was There. It’s a treasure-trove of all-time animated greats, and while the studio was initially set to close its doors in the late 2010s, there is more on the way. Hayao Miyazaki called off his post-The Wind Rises retirement to work on another Ghibli movie, though if you were hoping it might be arriving anytime soon, think again – it’s a long way off done yet.
The legendary animation director is working on a film called How Do You Live, based on a story by Yoshino Genzaburo. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, producer Toshio Suzuki described it as “a big, fantastical story”. He went on to explain, via a translator, that the project is entirely hand-drawn and progress is painstaking. "We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we're drawing more frames," he explains. “So, there are more drawings to draw than before. Back when we were making My Neighbour 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. 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.”
If Miyazaki’s film is at least three years off still, Suzuki noted that the director’s son, Goro Miyazaki, is also working on a new Studio Ghibli film that is entirely computer-generated. Details about that project are scarce, but Suzuki divulged that it’s “based on a book […] from England, and it’s a story about a very wise girl”. Ghibli has often looked to British stories for inspiration, adapting works by Mary Norton, Diana Wynne Jones, and Joan G. Robinson in the trademark Ghibli style. For now, we’ll be seeing out lockdown on an endless loop of the Ghibli classics – and waiting patiently for Hayao Miyazaki to finish his very special-sounding new film.
READ MORE: Every Studio Ghibli Movie Ranked