How Do You Live? will be released without any fanfare whatsoever by Studio Ghibli, who claims that deep down, this is what all audiences want.
Hayao Miyazaki is a legendary Studio Ghibli filmmaker who at this point in his career, needs no fanfare or trumpeting as his long list of achievements speak for itself. That’s good, because he’s not getting one either, as Ghibli has announced that his final film, How Do You Live? will be released without any marketing or promotion whatsoever.
It’s an audacious (and typically subversive) move from the studio that all but guarantees the film will be written about and covered more widely than if it had marketed the movie. It’s also a fitting swan song for the departure of the Spirited Away director who has been such an influential presence at Ghibli throughout the years. From production to reception, there’s always been something beautifully elastic about what a Miyazaki-helmed film can be, and without a marketing campaign to ‘prime’ audiences, they can truly go into his final film with the most open of minds.
Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki’s right-hand man at Ghibli, has been talking about the choice to the Japanese magazine Bungei Shunji (via The Hollywood Reporter), saying: “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.”
Suzuki would go on to throw a little shade at the Hollywood marketing machine, adding, “there’s an American movie — ah, I almost said the title out loud! — coming out this summer around the same time [as How Do You Live?]…. they’ve made three trailers for it, and released them one at a time. If you watch all three, 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.”
There’s no current release date for the film outside of Japan where it arrives on July 14th. We assume that Ghibli are going to tell us when it comes out though. The film has been described as ‘a coming of age a grand fantasy’ tale which sounds perfect to us. We’ll bring you a release date (but probably not a lot else) whenever we hear it.
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