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

Hayao Miyazaki’s next and apparently final film will be released with no trailer, marketing or other new promotional materials, it has been revealed.

In an interview with Japanese magazine Bungei Shunju, translated by the Hollywood Reporter, producer Toshio Suzuki said the film, titled How Do You Live?, would be released with “no trailers or TV commercials at all … no newspaper ads either.” He added: “Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire.”

How Do You Live? is due to be released in Japan on 14 July, but prospective filmgoers are not entirely devoid of information. Studio 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.

Miyazaki has reportedly been working on the film since 2016, after coming out of a previously announced retirement following the release of his last completed feature, The Wind Rises. Miyazaki was subsequently reported to have completed work on a short film called Boro the Caterpillar for the Studio Ghibli museum, which first screened there in 2018, as well as a feature-length version of the same project which is yet to see the light of day.

Miyazaki won the best animated film Oscar in 2003 for Spirited Away, and was nominated two further times, for Howl’s Moving Castle in 2006 and The Wind Rises in 2014. He was given an honorary Oscar in 2015.

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.”