The legendary Hayao Miyazaki He has announced that he was retiring so many times that one is no longer sure that he is going to do it before his death, but it seems that this time he is serious and that ‘How Do You Live?’ It will be his last movie. Perhaps that is why it is so surprising that Ghibli has opted for an unusual strategy when promoting its premiere: don’t show anything about it.
“We give up doing any of that”
Has been toshio suzuki, current president of Studio Ghibli, who when asked about the alarming lack of information about ‘How Do You Live?’ has revealed that “that’s because we gave up doing any of that“Come on, the study’s strategy with the promotional campaign is to have no strategy and whatever it has to be.
In fact, all we have of ‘How Do You Live?’ is a teaser poster released last December -although a couple of conceptual art images were also seen previously- and the fact that it will be an adaptation of the novel of the same name written by Genzaburo Yoshino in 1936. Of course, they have also made it clear that it will be a very free version of it with a different story, so this information does not contribute much either.
The Japan premiere of ‘How Do You Live?’ will take place on July 14 and at the moment it is unknown when it can be seen in the rest of the world. We’ll see if they make a trailer for the international market, but these words from Suzuki suggest that Ghibli seems to have lost confidence in their usefulness:
As part of the company’s operations, over the years Ghibli has wanted people to come see the movies we’ve made. So we’ve thought about it and we’ve done a lot of different things for that purpose, but this time we said to ourselves, ‘Hey, we don’t need to do that.’” Doing the same thing that you’ve done before, over and over again, tires you out. So we wanted to do something different.
Now the big question is whether that cannot end up turning against the film, since it is true that this way Ghibli will spend less money on it, but also that there will be people who may not even know about its premiere.
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