Miyazaki’s New Feature Will Take 20 Years To Complete At Its Current Pace Of Production

Hayao Miyazaki, 78, is making his new feature slowly…

very slowly…

very, very slowly.

According to a televised interview that aired this evening in Japan with Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki (as reported by Anime News Network), Miyazaki has completed about 15% of his upcoming feature How Do You Live? (Kimi-tachi wa Dō Ikiru ka) after over three years of working on it.

Suzuki said that in the past Miyazaki would direct seven to 10 minutes of animation per month, but that they’d scheduled a more leisurely pace of five minutes of animation per month for the new project. It hasn’t worked out as planned though; Miyazaki is currently directing only around one minute of animation per month.

The good news: the film isn’t late! That’s because Suzuki had previously stated that there was no “established deadline” for the completion of the film. Though Miyazaki had at one point said that the film would be done at the end of 2019, Suzuki’s most recent projections are somewhere between 2021-22.

But assuming Miyazaki keeps up his current pace of production (15% every three-and-a-half years), the film won’t be done until 2039, at which point he would be 98 years old. Thankfully, we’ve got a feeling that Miyazaki spent a lot of those first three years developing the story and storyboarding, and that the pace of production will pick up to meet Suzuki’s current projections.

Details about the plot of How Do You Live? are thin. The film takes it title from Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 book of the same name, and while it’s not an adaptation, the book reportedly plays a role in the coming-of-age adventure-fantasy, which follows a 15-year-old boy Koperu and his uncle.