Studio Ghibli will release ‘How Do You Live?’ without any promotional material
Studio Ghibli will release the final film of Hayao Miyazaki How Do You Live? without any promotional material, meaning it will not get a trailer or any marketing before it arrives in Japan on July 14th.
Of course, there is little known about the film because of that, but Miyazaki’s swansong is still one of the most anticipated releases to come out of East Asia for many years, a testament to the studio’s prowess.
The film is said to be loosely inspired by Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live? which is a coming-of-age novel about a young boy’s emotional journey following the death of his father.
Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki recently stated, “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.’ Doing the same thing you’ve done before, over and over, you get tired of it. So we wanted to do something different.”
“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?],” the producer continued. “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 went on to discuss how Miyazaki felt about the unique promotional campaign for his film. He said, “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,’ he said. 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…” Suzuki added. “No newspaper ads either. Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire.”
Never Miss A Scene
The Far Out Film Newsletter
All the latest film news from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.