Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and The Heron, the great animator's first film in a decade, was just released in Japan this past weekend. (That's the international title; in Japan it's called How Do You Live?) The film has been getting an unusual promotional rollout from Studio Ghibli, in that there's basically no promotion or marketing. No images from the film, no trailer, just an impressionistic poster.
"As part of company operations, over the years Ghibli has wanted people to come see the movies we’ve made," Studio Ghibli's Toshio Suzuki told Japanese magazine Bungei Shunji. "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. Doing the same thing you’ve done before, over and over, you get tired of it. So we wanted to do something different.”
They have, however, released The Boy and the Heron's theme song by Kenshi Yonezu -- a delicate ballad with a few Celtic touches. “I remember walking under the pitch-dark shades of the trees while overhearing the cheers of nursery school children nearby,” Yonezu said of the song. “As a person who usually writes music drawing from recollections of the past alone in a small room, it was an experience nothing short of enriching.” You can listen below.
The Boy and the Heron is based on the 1937 novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino and has been described as "fantasy on a grand scale." Longtime Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi composed the score. The film will be released in North America by GKIDS later this year. It is rumored that this will be the last film from Miyazaki, who is 82. His last film was 2013's The Wind Rises.
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