Legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who last year retired from making beautiful anime films so perfect they gently caressed our very souls, is back with a new animated short to offer up unto the world.
He’s not out of retirement – he’s just doing the Miyazaki equivalent of tinkering around in the shed, which, for him, is tinkering around with a new style of film making. In this case, 3D CG-animation, a move away from his trademark hand-drawn style.
Hayao’s son Goro Miyazaki (also of Studio Ghibli, of which Hayao is co-founder), announced the good great news on a talk show, according to Anime News Network.
“Now, Hayao Miyazaki is trying to make a short with CG to screen at the Ghibli Museum,” Goro said. “He gets bored with maintaining [the Ghibli Museum], so he needs things to fiddle around with.”
Oh, Hayao.
Studio Ghibli’s other co-founder, Toshio Suzuki, said at a lecture in Tokyo last week that the ten minute short will take no less than three years to complete. Dedication, thy name is Hayao.
The plot involves a hairy caterpillar, but that’s all we’ve got so far. The short will screen at the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, a magical wonderland of a place that takes visitors inside Miyazaki’s imagination. No word yet if it’ll play anywhere else, but we can hope, right?
Speaking to Variety last year, Miyazaki blatantly laid down that future works post-retirement were a possibility.
“I intend to work until the day I die,” he said. “I retired from feature-length films but not from animation. Self-indulgent animation.
It’s nice that I have the mini-theatre in the museum. Most of the museum visitors attend the mini-theatre screenings and we’ve never had a complain about the quality of the films.
I’d like to continue to make films that leave the audience satisfied, but I also think it’s pointless unless I offer them the kind of animation they can’t get anywhere else. They’re fun to do. They’re short so it’s less stressful.”
In related news, currently seeking cheap flights to Tokyo for 2018, if anyone knows a guy.
Image: Yoshikazu Tsuno via Getty Images
