Studio Ghibli to release Hayao Miyazaki’s final film

Studio Ghibli to release Hayao Miyazaki’s final film with no trailers or promotion

The director and veteran of Studio Ghibli plans to retire after the release of How Do You Live? which will forgo trailers and marketing ahead of its Japanese release next month

In a very Ghibli-esque move, the legendary anime house is asking fans to go see the film with no preconceptions: “Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire,” says producer Toshio Suzuki.

How Do You Live? opens in Japan on July 14 in Japan on 14 July, but prospective filmgoers are not entirely devoid of information.  It is easily the most anticipated movie coming to Japanese theaters in yearsStudio Ghibli, the film’s production house, released a poster for it in December, and Miyazaki revealed some details about the film in a 2017 interview, saying it was inspired by, but not a direct adaptation of, the 1937 novel of the same name by Genzaburō Yoshino.

Explaining the absence of marketing for the upcoming movie, which has already become conspicuous in Japan, Suzuki said: “As part of company operations, over the years Ghibli has wanted people to come see the movies we’ve made. So we’ve thought about that and done a lot of different things for that purpose — but this time we were like, ‘Eh, we don’t need to do that.’”

He added: “Doing the same thing you’ve done before, over and over, you get tired of it. So we wanted to do something different.”

Suzuki said that, in deciding not to make further materials available before release, the studio was reacting against what he considered the oversaturation of marketing materials by Hollywood, criticising a recent unnamed film for releasing three trailers. “If you watch all [the trailers], you know everything that’s going to happen in that movie. So how do moviegoers feel about that? There must be people, who, after watching all the trailers, don’t want to actually go see the movie. So, I wanted to do the opposite of that.”