Studio Ghibli’s producer, Toshio Suzuki, revealed on June 30 during a discussion held at the “Toshio Suzuki and Ghibli Exhibition” that the production of Hayao Miyazaki’s New Ghibli movie, How Do You Live?, is still in progress.

“… As already announced, Hayao Miyazaki has been working on How Do You Live?. It has been a long time, but the production is still in progress,” he said.

He also expressed his fear of people forgetting Ghibli since they rarely produce movies these days. And so he is doing writing and other production work.

“My most important job is… Ghibli used to mass-produce a film every two years, but since we only make one every once in a while these days, I don’t want people to forget about us, so I’m doing some writing and other production work to make sure Ghibli is not forgotten.” 

Key animator, Toshiyuki Inoue, had earlier revealed in an interview that he is currently working on Hayao Miyazaki‘s upcoming feature anime, How Do you Live?, and that it will be finished with the key animation by the end of February 2022.

In October 2017, Studio Ghibli announced the film would be titled “How Do You Live?“. Studio executive, Toshio Suzuki said that Miyazaki is working on the film for his grandson as his way of saying, “Grandpa is moving onto the next world soon but he is leaving behind this film”.

In December 2020, Suzuki stated that the film was in work with no deadlines, similar to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) which took eight years to make.

He said that the animation was half-finished with production running faster, due to COVID-19 restrictions requiring them to work at home, and the film will be 125 minutes long.

Miyazaki derived the film’s title from writer Genzaburō Yoshino‘s 1937 masterpiece of the same name. He added that this book is a story that has great meaning to the protagonist of his film.

Source: Cinema Today