Studio Ghibli’s New Animated Film is Being Hand-Drawn!

A little over a year ago, we received the fantastic news that after a few years in the wilderness, Studio Ghibli was back! Now, for those of you unaware of who they are, well… firstly I pity you. With an absolutely stunningly beautiful library of animated feature films, however, I may perhaps envy your opportunity to watch the near 30 films they’ve produced since the mid-’80s for the first time. Trust me, they’re absolutely fantastic and in these troubling self-isolating times, it’s a great way to spend some quality family time!

So, Ghibli was back and, better still, their key driving force Hayao Miyasaki had (yet again) stepped out of retirement to helm their next title called “How Do You Live?”. Sounds good right? Well, it seems that there have been a number of misconceptions surrounding this film.

You see, initially, people thought that Studio Ghibli was going to use computer animation for this project (something that they have leaned more towards in their recent(ish) films). In a report via Entertainment Weekly, however, it has been confirmed that this new animated feature will be entirely hand-drawn!

Studio Ghibli’s Next Feature to be Hand Drawn!

In an interview, Studio Ghibli’s producer Toshio Suzuki has confirmed that their Hayao Miyasaki film project is being hand-drawn. As you might expect, however, this has made the overall production take a lot longer and, as such, it makes the release date ‘years away’.

“We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we’re drawing more frames.

So, there are more drawings to draw than before. Back when we were making My Neighbor Totoro, we only had eight animators. Totoro we made in eight months. [For] the current film that Hayao Miyazaki is working on, we have 60 animators, but we are only able to come up with one minute of animation in a month. That means 12 months a year, you get 12 minutes worth of movie. Actually, we’ve been working on this film for three years, so that means we have 36 minutes completed so far. We’re hoping it will finish in the next three years.”

More Projects On the Way

In the interview, it has also been confirmed that Hayao Miyasaki’s son (Goro) is also working on a brand new feature film for the studio. Albeit, his project will be computer animated (and this may have been the source of the confusion).

So, the good news is that we have two new Studio Ghibli films currently in production. The bad news is that we’re probably not going to see either of them until (probably) at least 2022. Well, presuming that the computer-animated feature takes less time to make than Hayao Miyasaki’s hand-drawn masterpiece!

If you do, incidentally, want to learn more about Studio Ghibli, many of their films are currently available on Netflix and you can learn more about them via the link here!

What do you think? Are you a fan of Studio Ghibli? – Let us know in the comments!