Sunday, August 3, 2014

Bad News From Japan

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This is not going to make you happy.  Studio Ghibli has announced that they will stop making new movies and focus on simply handling their copyrights.  Given the state of animation art today, the loss of The House That Miyazaki Built is far worse than the loss of Pixar or Disney would be.

Apparently, if you can read Japanese there's enough ambiguity in the phrasing of the announcement to hold out hope that the studio might yet rise from the ashes.  So I shall.  But it's a slim reed nonetheless.

You can read The Telegraph's article here.

The (translated) bare bones announcement can be found here.

And an analysis of the announcement concluding that moviemaking will resume someday can be found here.


And as always . . .

I'm on the road again.  Since I'll be traveling all day and exhausted when I finally reach home, I'm posting my Monday blog the night before.


And as a footnote . . .

There remains one Studio Ghibli film yet to be released, When Marnie Was There. The trailer is more lovely than thrilling, but the movie was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi who made The Secret World of Arietty.  So it might well be splendid.

There's an article with Japanese language trailer here.

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1 comment:

David Stone said...

It seems like Miyazaki has already retired half a dozen times. I don't if I don't believe them when they say the studio won't make any more films, or if I assumed he had retired for good already and assumed anything without his direct input wouldn't be up to snuff... but for some reason the news just doesn't sting like it ought to.