Studio Ghibli Gears Up For New Film With No Commercial Marketing

Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, How Do You Live?, is set to open in Japan on July 14th with zero promotional advertising in advance according to Studio Ghibli. This film is extremely anticipated in Japan despite the little information provided. 

Studio Ghibli stated that the film is inspired by Japanese author Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel, How Do You Live?, setting up the film to have a “grand fantasy” feel. The film will feature a young boy in his coming-of-age story where the viewers will watch as he grips onto the emotional and philosophical understanding around his father’s death.  No trailer nor advertisements have been released for this movie despite the poster being released in December. Ghibli has not released the voice cast, animators, plot summary, or characters. Ghibli’s lead producer, Toshio Suzuki, sat down with Japanese magazine, Bungei Shunji, to talk more about the movie. Instead, he stated that nothing else will be released in regards to the film before it hits theaters:

“There’s an American movie …coming out this summer around the same time….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.”

Suzuki also revealed that it was a compliment from Miyazaki that inspired the idea of very little commercial marketing:

“I’ve been involved with our movies since Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), but this was the first time Hayao Miyazaki genuinely praised me. ‘Suzuki-san, this is amazing. This is the best poster you’ve ever made. I felt like that was a hint, so I decided ‘Let’s go with just this one poster for the marketing.’ So, no trailers or TV commercials at all … No newspaper ads either. Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire.”

With little information, Japan is currently the only country with a release date. U.S. and international release dates have yet to be set. Here is the poster for the film below: