Review: "How Do You Live?" — The Beginning and End of Hayao Miyazaki
The Studio Ghibli master's latest film is a fitting tribute and swan song to his decades-long career.
Disclaimer: While I went into this film without knowing anything about its plot, that likely will not be possible for most by the time it releases outside of Japan. This review thus contains light summary details out of necessity, but will not reveal major narrative spoilers. Since Studio Ghibli has not created any promotional materials outside of a single poster, images from Hayao Miyazaki’s previous works will instead be used throughout the piece.
One has to wonder what kind of dreams Hayao Miyazaki saw as a child and what major creative imagery stayed with him from his youth to his elderly years. That was what first came to mind throughout my time watching his newest work How Do You Live? — a film with no marketing, no advertisements, and no trailers. Just one poster.
Of course you’re probably asking, wasn’t Miyazaki’s last film at Studio Ghibli his last film? It’s somewhat a running gag at this point that the Japanese animation maestro always claims that his latest work will be his final one before permanent retirement, but he isn’t called the “Never-Ending Man” for nothing.
To be fair, The Wind Rises from 2013 actually did feel like the ultimate send-off to Miyazaki. That film was a fictionalized biopic about Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Empire of Japan’s major aircraft used during World War II. As an old-fashioned drama about a single man’s life throughout many years, it came across as the perfect finale to Miyazaki’s own career and his last testament before passing on his legacy at Ghibli to a new generation of animators.
And yet probably because Miyazaki’s own desire for creative output is so insatiable, it turns out that he still has more to say. With production having started since 2016, How Do You Live? has been a film shrouded in mystery throughout its many years of extended development. It took much longer to finish than Miyazaki himself probably expected, but the final result is something that feels both like an epilogue to his entire 60-year-long career and an origin story to where his ideas for creation came from.
How Do You Live? opens in 1943 with a fire spreading through Tokyo in striking scenes not dissimilar to what Miyazaki depicted in The Wind Rises or even Howl’s Moving Castle. Our protagonist, a 12-year-old boy named Mahito Maki, loses his mother Hisako in the ensuing events and moves to the countryside with his father Shoichi, who runs an air munitions factory. Mahito’s dad has remarried with Hisako’s sister Natsuko (a situation not too uncommon in those days), but the boy remains apprehensive toward his pregnant step-mother and struggles to fit in with his new surroundings.
With its Pacific War setting, I first assumed that the film would be yet another historical fiction story with some slice-of-life elements, but we soon learn that not all is as it seems. Mahito is constantly watched by a grey heron that seemingly appears everywhere and speaks to him in his daydreams. He is additionally fascinated by a mysterious tower located on the grounds of his family’s mansion. After falling ill, Natsuko disappears into the tower and the grey heron beckons Mahito to follow her while also claiming that his mother is still alive on the other side.
This is where How Do You Live? becomes classic Studio Ghibli, and what we have is basically a greatest hits of all the concepts Hayao Miyazaki has explored in his previous work. A plethora of odd spirits and crazy colors like Spirited Away? Check. Themes of aviation and soaring high above the skies like Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso? Check. A young protagonist coming of age and trying to find his way like Kiki’s Delivery Service? You bet. A castle like, well, The Castle of Cagliostro and Howl’s Moving Castle? You get the idea.
While it’s of course easy to poke fun at Miyazaki and Ghibli for constantly relying on the same tropes for decades, I don’t think anyone is going to really complain considering that they do them so well. How Do You Live? is no simple retread of Ghibli’s filmography either. Miyazaki presents what he has learned over his entire career and takes us on a trip down memory lane, while also introducing new creatures and sequences that stand strong among his best ideas seen in masterpieces like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. I expect the inevitable plushies of the bird characters to be hugely popular one day.
It’s also apparent that How Do You Live? is the director’s most autobiographical work. While younger than Mahito, Miyazaki was born in 1941 and thus has memories of the fire-bombings that devastated Japan in the final days of World War II. His father too owned a factory in the countryside which manufactured aircraft parts for the Imperial Japanese Army, allowing the family to have more affluence than the average household at the time. Like the film’s protagonist, Miyazaki was also distant from his father, but felt profound attachment to his mother. It’s well-known that he based the personality traits of many of Ghibli’s female characters on her, and How Do You Live? essentially shows us where all of that began.
Creation proves to be a pivotal theme in How Do You Live? The spirit world that Mahito enters in search of his mother is one of constant evolution, but it notably exists outside of the “real world” of adults who create war and make things harder for the next generation, hence the Pacific War backdrop. The film speaks to Miyazaki’s own lifetime of creativity, but in another sense it also urges the current audience of young viewers to not repeat the same mistakes of previous generations and instead create a better world. While I personally think that Miyazaki has been too heavy-handed at times with his messaging in other works and there are aspects of his worldview that I profoundly disagree with, How Do You Live? manages to strike a nuanced balance without feeling too preachy.
On a technical level, well, what’s there really to say? It’s a Studio Ghibli film and you know exactly what you’re getting, namely some of the finest animation produced by anyone in the world. While in the past few years we’ve been treated to anime works by directors like Makoto Shinkai such as Your Name which produced hyper-photorealistic settings, How Do You Live? is appropriately old-fashioned and feels right at home with the rest of the Hayao Miyazaki canon. It’s the first film of his to be shown in IMAX, and the bigger display format makes me glad I had a proper screening in a cinema. Characters look about as Ghibli-esque as you’d expect, while the backgrounds, clothing, creatures, and movement are all up to the same high standard we’ve seen since Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Ditto for the splendid orchestral music by Joe Hisaishi, who might as well be the John Williams of Japan at this point.
Many debated Ghibli’s decision to release How Do You Live? with no advertising, but the gambit ultimately paid off. The film is the company’s biggest opening yet, while word-of-mouth reviews and a slew of humorous fanart have been all the marketing needed. In our current world where seemingly every summer film needs to be a huge event with overstated hype and inevitable disappointment, it’s hugely refreshing to see a new work by an auteur director that comes out low-key and with the quality of the work itself being the only statement.
How Do You Live? is slated to have its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September under the title The Boy and the Heron, but I’m not too keen on the name. The original Japanese title encompasses the film’s themes far better and I’ll always refer to it that way.
The most of obvious question is what Hayao Miyazaki does from here. At 82 years old, he isn’t getting any younger and the long development of his latest work would have been a difficult task for someone even half his age. Studio Ghibli had not done a traditionally animated film since 2014 with When Marnie Was There and Miyazaki’s son Goro attempting to tackle 3D animation with 2020’s Earwig and the Witch did not see success.
Apart from a couple of short films and collaborative efforts like The Red Turtle, some even feared if Ghibli would never make another feature film again following Miyazaki’s announced retirement after The Wind Rises. Japanese tabloid magazines reported that studio co-founder Toshio Suzuki mismanaged company funds, but these claims remain unsubstantiated. Ghibli, however, is going through leadership restructuring and appears to still be in the game regardless of whatever politics are happening behind the scenes.
Like The Wind Rises before it, How Do You Live? really does feel like the end of a lifetime of one creator’s work, but I’ve always viewed Miyazaki as someone who could never stay put for long. Some directors like Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese are destined to create for the rest of their lives, and I think that he falls into that category. I can easily see Miyazaki still working on films into his late 80s and early 90s, even if his leadership role diminishes with age. At the very least, he will very likely stick around to continue teaching a new generation of Studio Ghibli staffers.
How Do You Live? poses its titular question to younger audiences, but there is little doubt to me that Hayao Miyazaki still asks himself the same question every day.
When you’re Hayao Miyazaki, you can get away with minimal promotion. But at the same time, my guess is that Miyazaki himself insisted on a tiny promotional campaign to contrast with the mega-studios of the world and their loud, flashy campaigns.