The eagerly anticipated movie, directed by Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki, was released in Japan on Friday. It is his first feature in ten years and most likely his last.
Making “How Do You Live?” required co-founder and 82-year-old Miyazaki, who also founded the renowned anime studio Ghibli, to come out of retirement.
It took years to complete, and the studio took the rare step of closely guarding plot details and providing little publicity.
The only indication of the plot came from a billboard depicting a hand-drawn bird-like monster with an eye hidden beneath its beak.
“It was a very Ghibli-esque movie,” university student Eisaku Kimura, 21, told AFP after watching a morning screening of the film in the trendy Shibuya district.
“It’s not like I felt anything special about it just because it was his last work, but I saw a lot of (Miyazaki) in the movie for sure, and it was exciting.”
“How Do You Live?” was inspired by a 1937 book of the same title, but the studio said previously the movie would be entirely different.
Following the passing of his mother, the youngster in the movie relocates to the country with his father.
He encounters a heron there, who flies him to an other reality where the truth of his mother’s demise eventually comes to light.
“It’s such a crazy mixture of all the Ghibli movies I’ve seen before,” Valeriia Matveeva, an English teacher from Russia, 30, told AFP.
“I think it takes the best of it, and I think it’s kind of scary at times but it’s also magical. Because there was no promotion, I had no idea what to think about it, but it was good.”
With his fanciful representations of nature and technology as well as well-known characters like the lovable Totoro, Miyazaki has developed a cult following.
In 2003, he won an Oscar for best animated picture for “Spirited Away,” a movie about a girl who becomes lost in a mystical land and tries to find her parents, who have been transformed into pigs. Miyazaki announced in 2013 that he will stop making full-length movies because he could no longer keep up the frantic pace of his meticulous work style.
Four years later, his production company made an about-face and announced that he was coming out of retirement to make what would be “his final film, considering his age.”
