How Do You Live, Mr. Miyazaki?

Some spoiler-free thoughts on Studio Ghibli’s latest anime

This cryptic poster represents the totality of promotional efforts for the film.

Update! Patrick and I talk about the film in a podcast you can listen to here!

I grew up on Hayao Miyazaki. On grainy pirated videocassette tapes I watched his creations soar across the old glass-tube RCA in my parents’ basement. I make no apologies. This is how it was in the Eighties. Until bootleg tapes began popping up at the Star Trek conventions my friends and I regularly cased in desperate hopes of finding one guy amid the Trekkies vending Japanese treasures, there was no other way of seeing Studio Ghibli films. There were no anime conventions in the States. The medium was so obscure as to not even fully represent a subculture. Nevertheless we found Miyazaki’s work: Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, Castle in the Sky: Laputa, and My Neighbor Totoro. I don’t know how many times I rewatched them, but Nausicaa left a particularly deep impression, its sprawling fantasy landscapes and epic aerial acrobatics unlike anything I’d seen in animation. Later I’d piece together that these were residual traumas of World War II processed through post-apocalyptic metaphor. At the time, all I knew was this: Miyazaki’s work was cut from a different cloth than the cartoons I’d watched to that point, even the ones I loved from Japan.

I don’t have to watch on pirate videotapes anymore. How Do You Live, Miyazaki’s latest and supposedly last film, arrived in Japanese theaters on Friday. I caught it in a sold-out early showing the next morning. It was the first Miyazaki film I’d seen in a decade, since 2013’s The Wind Rises. That had been a beautiful but hugely self-indulgent film, and with memories of that experience in mind, I will admit to approaching How Do You Live with low expectations. The Wind Rises was a movie about war without any war scenes, a love story without any love scenes, a biography of the designer of the Zero fighter without any scenes of the Zero in action. If anyone has earned the right to a little self-indulgence it is Miyazaki, but to be frank, I found that film meandering and even a little tedious. Would How Do You Live be more of the same?

The short answer is no! In fact, it’s quite engaging. For something widely touted as deeply personal and difficult to decipher, it is quite possibly Miyazaki’s most overtly crowd-pleasing film.

Miyazaki’s How Do You Live is based on a book of the same title that was published in 1937. It was written at the very tail end of Japan’s prewar flirtation with freedom and democracy, during the nation’s rapid descent into authoritarianism and belligerence. (And it would be banned, along with many other works, during those dark wartime years.) The book, long recommended to teens in Japan, is a coming of age tale told in part through a series of letters exchanged between a fifteen year old boy and his uncle. Its lessons on how to become “a fine example of a human being” deeply influenced young Miyazaki (and many other Japanese), but a snail-mail correspondence isn’t exactly the stuff of high drama. Wisely, only the title and the book’s broadest themes make it into the film. (Abroad, even that tenuous connection will be lost: word has it that it will be retitled The Boy and the Heron for English release.)

The animated adaptation arrived in Japan last week with zero fanfare. Studio Ghibli released no previews and held no press screenings for the film. It isn’t clear what led to this decision. Speculation in the Japanese press is that the success of THE FIRST SLAM DUNK movie, released last year in similar fashion, played a part. Or perhaps Studio Ghibli knows it is the 800 pound Totoro in the room. Any Ghibli release is a capital-H Happening, so why not save the millions an advertising campaign costs? Bets were certainly hedged. This is the closest I’ll come to a spoiler, and it isn’t a spoiler: in the end credits, trailer production staff gets named, so one seems to have been made. Whatever the case, I can assure you that there’s nothing really to be gained by going into How Do You Live “cold.” There are no jump scares or shocking twists here. 

And that’s kind of the problem. How Do You Live is a return to form in some ways, and a film in search of itself in others. The first third or so seems aimed squarely at adults, with some of the most harrowing and intriguingly animated sequences of the firebombing of Tokyo ever put to film. It is serious and sad and deliberately paced. But the film suddenly shoots off into what might be called Ghibli-land, with all of the familiar factors fans crave in a Ghibli film: a pre-teen protagonist grappling with the end of innocence; vaguely European settings; bold women young and old; anti-fascism; strange creatures ranging from the grotesque to super kawaii; and of course, always, lovingly conceived scenes of food and feasts. It is straight up young-adult fantasy, the whimsy of which doesn’t quite gel with the grim setup. This section feels designed to entertain younger audiences, but it is also scattered with numerous quiet call-backs to previous films. Nothing obvious, but subtle framings and setups, winks and nods to those who grew up on the stuff. 

Whether all of this feels like a much-deserved victory lap or coloring by numbers depends on your mindset. A few times the “Ghibli sauce” felt laid on thick enough to jar me out of the fantasy. Like a Miyazaki protagonist I’d slipped the surly bonds of reality… into a vision of a Ghibli park gift shop, where plush portrayals of these characters will undoubtedly soon be on sale. 

Miyazaki’s rise parallels that of anime’s rise in popularity abroad. When Totoro came out in 1988, he was pushing 50 and I was all of 15. Nobody abroad knew who he was then. Now it is I who am pushing 50, and he has released what is purported to be his final theatrical feature, to great international interest. It’s a good film. It’s also a safe one, for better and for worse. In my personal rankings, it is no Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, but neither is it one of the plodding late-Ghibli titles whose names I’ve forgotten.

I’m not sure if How Do You Live possesses the power to win hearts and minds, in the way Ghibli films did mine in the Eighties, or Spirited Away did for mass American audiences’ back in 2003. What I do know is that exposure to Miyazaki’s work at a formative age answered the titular question of how I’d live: wherever they were making this cool stuff! And if you grew up on Ghibli, I suspect you’ll see some of your life in here, too. In the end, maybe that’s all that matters.