How Do You Live: Hayao Miyazaki releases mystery final film

Friday saw How Do You Live come out in Japanese cinemas - the latest and ostensibly last film from renowned animation director Hayao Miyazaki.

It is hard to overstate the influence of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, the animation studio he co-founded with the late director Isao Takahata.

Three of Miyazaki's films - Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle - all feature in Japan's 10 highest-grossing films, and he has inspired generations of both animation and live-action filmmakers in Japan and around the world.

His 2001 film Spirited Away won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards. Miyazaki himself was given the Academy's Honorary Award in 2014.

How Do You Live (Kimitachi wa Do Ikiru ka) takes its title from the 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino, but its story is a wholly original one, penned by Miyazaki.

The film is set in Japan during World War Two and centres around a young boy named Mahito whose mother is killed in a fire.

Shortly thereafter his father, who works in a factory producing fighter planes, marries his late wife's younger sister Natsuko, and moves the family to her large ancestral home in the countryside.

Mahito, who is resentful of Natsuko for taking his mother's place, begins to explore the area around the house and discovers a mysterious tower which he is told not to enter.

He also encounters a grey heron that can speak (as seen on the film's poster) who claims Mahito's mother is in fact alive and in the tower waiting to be rescued. Mahito dismisses this claim, but when his new stepmother disappears into the tower he decides to rescue her.

Once he enters, he is transported into an alternate world full of magic where his quest brings him into contact with new friends and enemies alike.

The film is full of Miyazaki's signature obsessions, quirks and thematic concerns. There are the usual visual treats, like cute yet eerie creatures, great-looking food and gravity-defying flights of fancy - primarily hand-drawn and moving with the fluidity and sense of weight that mark the master animator's work.

Thematically, as in films like Kiki's Delivery Service and Spirited Away, How Do You Live is a coming-of-age tale in which a child must overcome his selfishness and learn to live for others.

How Do You Live also echoes the director's own biography. Miyazaki's father, like Mahito's, worked for a firm that produced parts for fighter planes, and his own family also evacuated from the city to the countryside during the war. Miyazaki also had a deep bond with his own mother, who was said to have had a large influence on his work and the strong female characters in his films.

How Do You Live has not had the same level of release-day buzz as might be expected for a new release from a director of Miyazaki's fame. There have been no trailers or TV spots, and the lone hint as to what the film might be about has come via a single enigmatic poster.

This anti-PR push is a deliberate strategy on the part of Studio Ghibli president and How Do You Live producer Toshio Suzuki, who told a prominent Japanese magazine in June: "I thought giving out too much information would reduce audience interest."

A Friday afternoon review of several cinemas in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo's major entertainment districts, showed early morning and evening screenings nearly sold out, but many seats available for afternoon and late night showings.

Anecdotally, many friends I have surveyed over the past week had no idea a new Miyazaki film was set for this weekend. Box office numbers released once the weekend is over will tell a more complete story, but the strategy may be to start slow and build the audience over the coming weeks through word of mouth.

Miyazaki's final film - for real this time?

Miyazaki has threatened to retire from feature filmmaking numerous times, most notably in 2013 after the release of his film The Wind Rises. It didn't stick: the director began work on How Do You Live in 2016.

With production on this film taking seven years, and considering the director's age (he turned 82 in January) however, How Do You Live is ostensibly his final feature film.

While Miyazaki's legacy is assured, the future of Studio Ghibli is less clear. The studio, founded to produce films by Miyazaki and Takahata, has made several attempts to pass the baton to the next generation over the years with mixed success.

Spirited Away is one of Japan's top-grossing films

One potential successor, Yoshifumi Kondo, who directed the studio's well-received Whisper of the Heart in 1995, died shortly after aged 47. Miyazaki's son Goro has directed three films at the studio, including the recent computer-animated Earwig and the Witch, but his films have not received the same level of financial or critical success as his father's.

President Toshio Suzuki has announced that Ghibli is planning its next film, and the studio has recently expanded into ventures like Ghibli Park, a distinctly un-Disney-like theme park in Nagoya, Japan. (At the screening of How Do You Live I attended, I was handed a file folder advertising the park upon entering the theatre.)

In the decade since Miyazaki's first retirement, directors like Makoto Shinkai (Your Name) and Mamoru Hosoda (Belle) have had huge domestic box office success with their own original anime IPs, while in 2020 a feature adaptation of the manga Demon Slayer surpassed Spirited Away to become Japan's highest-grossing film of all time. Regardless of what happens to Ghibli itself, Miyazaki's ultimate legacy may be helping to establish animated films as Japan's best-loved form of entertainment.

Matt Schley is an independent film and anime reviewer based in Japan