The World’s Greatest Animator Has A New Movie Coming Out

By Matthew Creith | Published

Hayao Miyazaki hows moving castle

As far as animated movies go, the last few years have been tremendous for large-scale animated features being released both in theaters and direct to streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+. This year alone, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Turning Red, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio have taken center stage, and many of them will end up taking home top honors at awards shows like the Academy Awards. Now, Deadline reports that the world’s greatest animator, Hayao Miyazaki, will be releasing a new animated film next year entitled How Do You Live.

Popular amongst animation film genre fans, Hayao Miyazaki has enjoyed a successful career behind the camera largely due to his mark as an innovator of Japanese animation, and this next film will be his first in 10 years after the remarkable 2013 World War II film The Wind Rises. How Do You Live will have a Japanese theatrical release on July 14, 2023, and will be incorporating themes from the 1937 novel of the same name by Yoshino Genzaburo, and will most likely release worldwide after. That novel will be a prime focus of the main protagonist of the movie as the real novel plays into the fictional character’s life as depicted by Miyazaki.

Known for the personal touches that he places upon all of his animated movies, How Do You Live might be 81-year-old Hayao Miyazaki’s final film of his well-established career. A master storyteller in every sense of the word, Miyazaki worked his way up through the animation style of filmmaking by joining Toei Animation in the 1960s and contributing to many of Toei Animation’s titles of the time. As an animator, Miyazaki worked on several well-known movies of the era, including Puss in Boots and Animal Treasure Island before jumping to other companies in the 1970s.

spirited away Hayao Miyazaki

As a director, Hayao Miyazaki became a household name within the animation world when he started his own studio in the 1980s called Studio Ghibli, which will be the producing partner involved in the making of How Do You Live. The classic 1997 film Princess Mononoke became Miyazaki’s crowning achievement up to that point in his career, earning a box office gross of over $169 million against a budget of $23.5 million. Becoming a worldwide phenomenon upon its release, Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax purchased distribution rights for Princess Mononoke in North America, dubbed the movie into English, and gave the movie access via DVD sales to American audiences.

Since the success of Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki has gone on to bring global audiences more animated films that continue to break records to this day. Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle were wildly successful at the box office and with critics, with the former grossing close to $400 million and the latter having been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Many directors and fellow animators have noted Hayao Miyazaki’s influence on their body of work, including globally recognizing helmers like James Cameron, Wes Anderson, and Guillermo del Toro.