Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live is a beautiful relic – and the end of an era

There were long lines snaking out of theaters to see it despite the almost complete lack of marketing. Maybe people are sick of being marketed to, I certainly am. I'm not reading this review because I don't want to know anything about the movie before I see it. Even the international title is a disappointing concession to the retailing of art as entertainment product.

What's the over-under that Miyazaki cares one whit about how it does at the box office, though?

Based on his past work, he doesn't seem like the sort of person who sees money as a way of keeping score. And this isn't the first time that he's retired and come back to make one last film.

Maybe he just wanted to tell another story, and didn't feel like bothering with the whole palaver of drumming up interest and courting the press?

Seriously! I had no idea this even EXISTED and I actually sat down and looked over all the upcoming movies recently-- multiple times!

This only makes sense if you value "box office numbers" for their own sake which this signals very clearly that they do not. As the article points out it's not the first time he's said he thinks his career has run its course, but there's also no reason to think he wasn't sincere any of those times.

He knows he's famous and it will do very well without marketing. Why optimize a metric you don't care about? I don't find the cynical laziness explanation as convincing as the stated motivation tbh.

I learned about it a few weeks ago because the cinema and anime blogs were posting about a new Miyazaki project that had zero marketing, which is a kind of brilliant marketing in itself. So, here we are discussing marketing strategy about a film that wasn't marketed.

> but there's also an extraordinarily low level of discussion. I was shocked when I clicked on the first review and realized it was a review - "oh, huh, when did it come out?"

You are commenting on an article in the Verge for a movie which has only been released in Japan and won’t be out in the USA for months. This article is one of many in most western publications. A lot can be said about this movie but having a low level of discussion is definitely not one of them.

What’s the point of a marketing campaign when you have so much organic reach?

> even Hayao Miyazaki can't release a movie with zero marketing and expect no effect

At Hayao Miyazaki level, having no marketing IS a very clear PR move. The article states it clearly, it's adding mystery to the movie. Everyone knows that it's not going to be a bad movie since it's a Ghibli one, but also no one knows what it is about so everyone is impatient to go watch it and discover all that mystery.

Since the opposite is true, I've lost interest in movies when the trailer revealed way too much, I can see this as a clear move in the opposite direction.

Haven't watched yet but words I have seen used to describe so far are it's a concentrate, a funeral, those kinds. And there's absolutely no trailer for this movie; there's the poster, a "quock quock quock" tweet from Ghibli's Twitter account, that's all that are out of theaters on this matter.

Now that I'm mildly spoiled by Verge I have to go watch it. damn. Hopefully they don't mandate suit and a tie.

>even Hayao Miyazaki can't release a movie with zero marketing and expect no effect...

But, but Hayao Miyazaki could not give less fucks about the effect...

I feel the same about all movies hitting theaters these days. The marketing and the social discussions just aren't there anymore.

> Hayao Miyazaki can't release a movie with zero marketing and expect no effect...

He doesn’t care. He won an Oscar and didn’t show up. The Oscar is still at Disney.

I am one of I presume millions of Americans for whom the words

> new Miyasaki flick

are all the marketing I need. Even the poster is superfluous. As long as somebody reminds me when the film lands in the States, I'm there.

I don't think that's particularily controversial, maybe except among the most hardcore fans. Watch films(and other media) in the way you enjoy them, and don't let others tell you what's the "right" way.

The English dubs are also just really good. Even when the voice actors aren't known for, well, voice acting. Daisy Ridley is not known for her voice acting and yet her performance in Only Yesterday was exceptional.

Miyazaki is pretty well known for having “world-class” dubs; I don’t think liking them is considered controversial. Liking the Akira dub or the dub on a Satoshi Kon film, on the other hand :-)

Fun fact, on Princess Mononoke, Steve Alpert and the director of the English dub had to fight Miramax executives who kept trying to screw up Neil Gaiman's English script.

I don't have thoughts about anime, but generally dislike movie dubs as they distance me further from the original intent. I don't want another team's reinterpretation of the movie to completely replace the original expression.

So, I'd only really like a dub if it was a multilingual sound track produced by an original, multilingual team. That should include the original director, writers, and (preferably) actors and producers. To me, the original creative team needs enough fluency to review the alternate language work and keep it from diverging. Otherwise, it's about as satisfying as reading a Cliff's Notes summary of a novel instead of the actual novel.

I'd also often prefer subtitle translations if they try to hew closer to the original language including temporality. I'd rather read slightly tortured English subtitles to deliver translated parts of speech in roughly the same order they are being spoken in the original language, exposing a bit of the original language's grammar and remaining correlated with the actor's tone and timing.

I asked a frAInd what famous actors dubbed miyzazki movies:

"Spirited Away" (2001) - Daveigh Chase, Jason Marsden, and Susan Egan.

"Princess Mononoke" (1997) - Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, and Billy Bob Thornton.

"My Neighbor Totoro" (1988) - Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning.

"Howl's Moving Castle" (2004) - Christian Bale, Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, and Billy Crystal.

"Ponyo" (2008) - Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, and Liam Neeson.

"The Wind Rises" (2013) - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci.

"Porco Rosso" (1992) - Michael Keaton and Cary Elwes.

"Kiki's Delivery Service" (1989) - Kirsten Dunst, Phil Hartman, and Janeane Garofalo.

I would never watch Princess Mononoke without the English dub.

Miyazaki movies are the ONLY anime where the English dub is anywhere close to good enough. Most anime dubs are done by either A) people who can't act their way out of a paper bag, or B) competent actors who don't bother to pronounce Japanese names properly. Miyazaki movies don't fall into A but do have some major B clinkers. At least with the subtitles I get to work on my Japanese a bit.

It mostly depends on the quality of the dubbing. The trend for anime was to have excellent Japanese voice acting and terrible dubs, until western editors realized that good dubs sell and invested in better voice acting.

Miyazaki films, being popular, big budget theater releases didn't suffer as much from cheap dubbing as TV series.

There's obviously no one-to-one, Miyazaki being a legend for a reason. But I've founded the work by Satoshi Kon to give me a blending of fiction and reality and depth of storytelling makes me think a little of what Miyazaki does.

Look into Makoto Shinkai. Specifically, Your Name and Children Who Chase Lost Voices.

Mamoru Oshii is excellent, in the USA he's probably best known for "Ghost in the Shell" but I think some of his other work is easily as good. "Uresei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer" is amazing, as is "Patlabor 2".

Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame has been talking about doing something with Nausicaa for a while. He worked on the original movie (which is only 1/4th of the source manga) with Miyazaki and became close friends with him, and Miyazaki said he could do it, so that might be interesting if it ever happens.

If you factor in 19 years of inflation, I wonder who is the winner.

It is not black on red besides the title? Did you not scroll anywhere past the title bit? :/

https://ibb.co/Fm0zz35

I mean, it's the final film from a legendary director being released with a total lack of a traditional marketing. Do you want people to not talk about that?

Not everything on the internet is astroturfing or whatever.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the context you're coming from, but I've always presumed that international titles are implicitly translated into English in English-language material. For the benefit of other readers: To my beginner Japanese–learning ear, "How Do You Live" is a pretty straightforward translation of "kimitachi ha dō ikiru ka". I don't think there's any subtext of English-language exceptionalism, here or in general, especially since this translation is so straightforward (except for maybe an English translation losing the nuance of "kimitachi").

Again though, I readily concede that your online interactions may be very different from mine—just wanted to add my 2¢ :-)

  kimi-tachi     wa    dou iki-ru       ka
  you-and.others TOPIC how live-NONPAST QUESTION  

“How do you live?” seems like an OK out-of-context translation?

Those are always fraught for cinema—the Russian release of Inception was titled Начало načalo “beginning”, which of course wasn’t the translation of the titular concept during the film itself (that was внедрение vnedrenie “integration, infiltration”)—but if you have to give something to an English-speaking audience, it’s probably as good as it gets. (Specifying the translation is on shaky ground would be good journalistic practice, of course.)

Just in case you are not aware, How Do You Live (the film) is based on a book, How Do You Live. The book was translated and its English name is just How Do You Live.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54110592

> I'm irked by this because this is something I've been constantly correcting people with, mainly to indirectly challenge English-language exceptionalism (anything not Japanese is English - we don't know the French or German titles yet),

This is needlessly pedantic. By that logic, your use of Romaji is "incorrect" and Euro-centric exceptionalism, because the official original movie poster uses Hanji/Katakana. (And in fact, it'd be "incorrect" to say it was released in Japan, because in Japan, they'd say it was released in Nippon.)

It's an English-language article about a Japanese movie. Saying "titled 君たちはどう生きるか and renamed The Boy and the Heron for the international market" would make no sense because the audience of English readers won't be able to make sense of it.

It's not "English-language exceptionalism" to provide information in English when writing for an English-speaking audience, especially when it's clear in context that the information is a translation.

Who is this "correction" for? Is there an actual existing person who thought the title of the movie was in English, and not a Japanese phrase that translates as "How Do You Live?"