While no stranger to big issues like war, death, conservation, loss or love Hayao Miyazaki‘s Studio Ghibli is known most well for packaging those concepts in movies that can be appreciated by all ages… even if some of the younger ones don’t necessarily see the significance of the socio-political message of Princess Mononoke, for example.
But Ghibli has made some more “realistic” films, and according to Miyazaki himself, his next one is going to go back to that earlier sentiment.
From Geek Out!
In a recent interview with Japanese entertainment website Hollywood Channel, Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki said Miyazaki’s vision for the studio’s next film will be more “realistic” and less geared toward fantastical universes.
While Suzuki indicated Miyazaki’s next outing was not inspired by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, he did say the director “had already predicted the current state of Japan during the planning stages of his next work.”
Suzuki described the film as “not the sort of work that everyone in the audience can relax and watch.”
Grave of the Fireflies is probably what most would consider to be the most “serious” Ghibli film, a story of two siblings struggling to survive in a near-post-WWII-Japan, with the specter of starvation and abandonment looming large. Things, uh, don’t turn out too well. It’ll be really interesting to see Studio Ghibli return to movies of this sort of tone, especially if it is released in America. Anything to wake the country up to the fact that animation is a medium capable of telling any story, not a genre capable of telling only a few.
(via Geek Out!)
