It'll be interesting to see how the box office does. It's been a while since _The Wind Rises_ and Miyazaki is more beloved than ever and all 3 reviews I've read thus far seem highly positive (and certainly more positive than _The Wind Rises_), but there's also an extraordinarily low level of discussion. I was shocked when I clicked on the first review and realized it was a review - "oh, huh, when did it come out?"
The justification offered about 'people being tired of marketing' sounds absurd, and more like they are finding excuses to skip work because they are old & exhausted, and another step in winding down Ghibli. I expect lower box office than it deserves; even Hayao Miyazaki can't release a movie with zero marketing and expect no effect...
> but there's also an extraordinarily low level of discussion. I was shocked when I clicked on the first review and realized it was a review - "oh, huh, when did it come out?"
You are commenting on an article in the Verge for a movie which has only been released in Japan and won’t be out in the USA for months. This article is one of many in most western publications. A lot can be said about this movie but having a low level of discussion is definitely not one of them.
What’s the point of a marketing campaign when you have so much organic reach?
There were way more Western articles about _The Wind Rises_ back then. I definitely wasn't clicking on a review and going 'wait, that came out already?' Everyone knew, whether or not they had any interest in anime.
> even Hayao Miyazaki can't release a movie with zero marketing and expect no effect
At Hayao Miyazaki level, having no marketing IS a very clear PR move. The article states it clearly, it's adding mystery to the movie. Everyone knows that it's not going to be a bad movie since it's a Ghibli one, but also no one knows what it is about so everyone is impatient to go watch it and discover all that mystery.
Since the opposite is true, I've lost interest in movies when the trailer revealed way too much, I can see this as a clear move in the opposite direction.
What's the over-under that Miyazaki cares one whit about how it does at the box office, though?
Based on his past work, he doesn't seem like the sort of person who sees money as a way of keeping score. And this isn't the first time that he's retired and come back to make one last film.
Maybe he just wanted to tell another story, and didn't feel like bothering with the whole palaver of drumming up interest and courting the press?
There were long lines snaking out of theaters to see it despite the almost complete lack of marketing. Maybe people are sick of being marketed to, I certainly am. I'm not reading this review because I don't want to know anything about the movie before I see it. Even the international title is a disappointing concession to the retailing of art as entertainment product.
I'm not sure how I'd title it if I were the American distributor, to be honest.
It's not an adaptation, but 君たちはどう生きるか is the name of a book for young adults that the Japanese audience might be familiar with; the reference will be lost on an English-speaking audience, draining it of some of its meaning and nostalgia. Imagine a film called "The Little Prince" or something...but of course, The Little Prince isn't the same book, with the same themes, as 君たちはどう生きるか. And even if there were a book which the reference mapped onto well, it still feels like referencing a different title in the translation would be egregious.
In that sense, I'm somewhat fond of "The Boy and the Heron", though I acknowledge it isn't ideal and, as someone who prefers more literal translations, wouldn't necessarily be the route I'd take. Without injecting any specific (and thus wrong) reference, it evokes the nostalgic feeling of English childhood fables and aphorisms - and it lends it their feeling of moral weight, too, just as the Japanese title does. It's a good and evocative title.
The literal translation everyone's using, "How Do You Live?", also isn't ideal. There's a couple of grammatical mismatches between the two languages; whereas the "you" in English can be both singular and plural, the Japanese is explicitly plural; and Japanese doesn't explicitly differentiate present and future tense, and here the meaning is actually likely more future tense. But the big problem is that, to my ears, it sounds deeply accusatory in English, along the lines of "How do you live with yourself?" - and given Miyazaki's views and temperament that wouldn't have surprised me! But in truth the intended Japanese meaning is more inquisitive and philosophical. The original title, in the original novel, is from a book inside of the book, left as a question to the reader. In prose I might translate it as, "How will you, readers, choose to live your lives?", but there's countless variations I've considered; none of them are quite right, and to be honest none quite have the original's punch of a good title!
(disclaimer: I'm a reasonably advanced student of the Japanese language but not a native speaker. Apologies if I've gotten anything wrong.)
That's an excellent argument. While I'd have preferred to stay closer to the original title (eg 'How shall we live?', where the 'we' connotates an abstract us), you make a good case for why the distributors might have opted for vague and mysterious over philosophical but possibly awkward.
Huh. I read the new English translation of the book and came away with just that sentiment: Copper lets his friends down and has to figure out how to go on.
This only makes sense if you value "box office numbers" for their own sake which this signals very clearly that they do not. As the article points out it's not the first time he's said he thinks his career has run its course, but there's also no reason to think he wasn't sincere any of those times.
He knows he's famous and it will do very well without marketing. Why optimize a metric you don't care about? I don't find the cynical laziness explanation as convincing as the stated motivation tbh.
Haven't watched yet but words I have seen used to describe so far are it's a concentrate, a funeral, those kinds. And there's absolutely no trailer for this movie; there's the poster, a "quock quock quock" tweet from Ghibli's Twitter account, that's all that are out of theaters on this matter.
Now that I'm mildly spoiled by Verge I have to go watch it. damn. Hopefully they don't mandate suit and a tie.
I learned about it a few weeks ago because the cinema and anime blogs were posting about a new Miyazaki project that had zero marketing, which is a kind of brilliant marketing in itself. So, here we are discussing marketing strategy about a film that wasn't marketed.
I prefer Miyazaki movies dubbed in English, rather than as subtitled Japanese.
This is not true for ANY other non-English movie, where I always prefer the original language with subtitles.
Why? Well, it's anime and the characters aren't "really" speaking Japanese anyway, so there's less lip-mismatch. And apparently the Man himself doesn't mind them.
I don't have thoughts about anime, but generally dislike movie dubs as they distance me further from the original intent. I don't want another team's reinterpretation of the movie to completely replace the original expression.
So, I'd only really like a dub if it was a multilingual sound track produced by an original, multilingual team. That should include the original director, writers, and (preferably) actors and producers. To me, the original creative team needs enough fluency to review the alternate language work and keep it from diverging. Otherwise, it's about as satisfying as reading a Cliff's Notes summary of a novel instead of the actual novel.
I'd also often prefer subtitle translations if they try to hew closer to the original language including temporality. I'd rather read slightly tortured English subtitles to deliver translated parts of speech in roughly the same order they are being spoken in the original language, exposing a bit of the original language's grammar and remaining correlated with the actor's tone and timing.
The English dubs are also just really good. Even when the voice actors aren't known for, well, voice acting. Daisy Ridley is not known for her voice acting and yet her performance in Only Yesterday was exceptional.
Only Yesterday is a very good movie. A true anime for adults, not one that mistakes "adultness" for "naked people and/or gore".
Re: dubs. I haven't watched the English dub of too many Ghibli movies, mostly because if I watch a dub, I watch it in Spanish. Judging by the only one I've seen in English too -- Princess Mononoke -- I'd rate the English dub the worst, with flatter and less inspired voice acting. The Spanish version of Mononoke is actually tied in quality with the Japanese version in my mind.
I used to believe I could only detect bad acting in my native Spanish. Mononoke taught me that no, I can spot bad acting in English too! I don't know what the hell Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver and all those well known actors were doing...
Fun fact, on Princess Mononoke, Steve Alpert and the director of the English dub had to fight Miramax executives who kept trying to screw up Neil Gaiman's English script.
Miyazaki is pretty well known for having “world-class” dubs; I don’t think liking them is considered controversial. Liking the Akira dub or the dub on a Satoshi Kon film, on the other hand :-)
The English dub of Castle In The Sky was famously very poor[1]. Most notably, much of the movie's quiet parts got crammed with music and extra dialog because Disney felt Americans' attention span could not handle long stretches of silence and simple ambient environment sounds.
Granted this was one of the earlier Ghibli films and Miyazaki reportedly clamped down on these shenanigans on future dubs.
This listicle is hard to follow: it seems to be confounding the 1988 dub (hilariously bad) with the 1998 dub (which was done by Disney and is, IMO, pretty good). In particular, the items about Sheeta's recharacterization and removed silences don't apply to the 1998 dub.
Miyazaki has had his fair share of bad dubs (including one of the Castle of Cagliostro ones), but I think it's fair to say that he's fared the best of any major Japanese anime director.
I don't think that's particularily controversial, maybe except among the most hardcore fans. Watch films(and other media) in the way you enjoy them, and don't let others tell you what's the "right" way.
Miyazaki movies are the ONLY anime where the English dub is anywhere close to good enough. Most anime dubs are done by either A) people who can't act their way out of a paper bag, or B) competent actors who don't bother to pronounce Japanese names properly. Miyazaki movies don't fall into A but do have some major B clinkers. At least with the subtitles I get to work on my Japanese a bit.
It mostly depends on the quality of the dubbing. The trend for anime was to have excellent Japanese voice acting and terrible dubs, until western editors realized that good dubs sell and invested in better voice acting.
Miyazaki films, being popular, big budget theater releases didn't suffer as much from cheap dubbing as TV series.
Miyazaki's anime are unique about VA. He doesn't like existing Japanese "anime" VA acting, so they adopt non-voice actors or other people (even Anno!) as VA for his work.
They say we don’t see movies like this being made anymore, but when did we ever see movies like Miyazaki’s being made at any time by anyone other than Miyazaki?
There's obviously no one-to-one, Miyazaki being a legend for a reason. But I've founded the work by Satoshi Kon to give me a blending of fiction and reality and depth of storytelling makes me think a little of what Miyazaki does.
In particular, Tokyo Godfathers hits in a way that not even Miyazaki can replicate IMO. Satoshi Kon probably wasn't as consistent as Miyazaki. But damn, the good Satoshi Kon movies were just beyond excellent.
Mamoru Hosoda is also pretty good. Wolf Children is one of the most "hits you in the real feels" movie that I've seen, despite its surface-level fantasy premise. A true masterpiece, though other movies from Hosoda aren't quite as good IMO. Still, his Digimon and Summer Wars are fun watches.
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There's that off-branch of Ghibli, Studio Ponac too. I've only seen their collection of 3x short films: Modest Heroes (one about a crab family, one about an egg allergy, and one about an invisible guy), but its extremely "Ghibli-like".
Modest Heroes is that mix of fantasy but very much down-to-earth storytelling that reflects upon life, in a child-friendly storytelling style. "Ghibli-style" as people might say.
I was a huge fan of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Wolf Children, and started watching everything he made, only to find that he was no longer able to produce movies of that quality. The last 3 - The Boy and the Beast, Mirai, and Belle - have been mediocre at best with stories and characters that were very poorly assembled. I continue to have some hope for future films, but frankly my expectations are very low at this point. Not many directors have produced 3 duds in a row in the prime of their career and then recovered with incredible stories later.
>Satoshi Kon probably wasn't as consistent as Miyazaki.
Well, aside from a few small projects, he only made four movies and one show, and in my estimation they're all excellent. Paranoia Agent I would say is deliberately uneven, being assembled from various unused ideas from past projects, and is quite effective in that way.
Paranoia Agent really is a masterpiece. It works incredibly well.
Every time it comes up, I have to shill Kuuchuu Buranko as something anyone who enjoyed Paranoia Agent should watch. It, along with Tatami and Paranoia, are my personal trifecta of shows that use the medium to the max.
Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame has been talking about doing something with Nausicaa for a while. He worked on the original movie (which is only 1/4th of the source manga) with Miyazaki and became close friends with him, and Miyazaki said he could do it, so that might be interesting if it ever happens.
Mamoru Oshii is excellent, in the USA he's probably best known for "Ghost in the Shell" but I think some of his other work is easily as good. "Uresei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer" is amazing, as is "Patlabor 2".
Article ends with "And let’s not forget the monster 2020 success of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, whose 40 billion yen domestic gross demolished Spirited Away’s record of the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan."
Nitpick:
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_Japan... - it shows Demon Slayer at ¥40,430,000,000 (2020) and Spirited Away at ¥31,680,000,0000 (2001). This is like comparing $220 million to $290 million so it's not exactly 'demolishing' IMO.
Is this a bug or something[1]? Or is The Verge seriously expecting me to read an entire article in black-on-red? This has got to be some kind of cruel joke, my eyes hurt after about 5 seconds.
Who came up with this atrocious design language? Ironically, the polar opposite of Miyazaki.
The whole thing is red for me (the screenshot I took is from below the title). I use Brave, but I also checked it out on Edge and Chrome, and there it's only the title (so I do think it's a bug on Brave). To be fair, even the title being black on red is absolute garbage-tier design.
Why does he need to market. I know about this movie because of all of the "not being marketed" news posts. Media is giving them a free marketing coupon it seem. He's playing it well.
That said I rarely see movie marketing anymore. Only movies I know are out are barbie and Oppenheimer due to the meme and my friend insisting we go to both.
Very excited for this. I wish more films went with the no marketing approach, but I suppose it can only (maybe?) work if you're as regarded as Miyazaki.
I mean, it's the final film from a legendary director being released with a total lack of a traditional marketing. Do you want people to not talk about that?
Not everything on the internet is astroturfing or whatever.
>titled How Do You Live in Japan and renamed The Boy and the Heron for the international market
This might sound pedantic, but neither of those statements are quite right. It's not called "How Do You Live" in Japan, it's called Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka. And it wasn't "renamed" for the "international" market, it was given an English name that it didn't have until then.
I'm irked by this because this is something I've been constantly correcting people with, mainly to indirectly challenge English-language exceptionalism (anything not Japanese is English - we don't know the French or German titles yet), but also a reminder that any publication worth its salt up have emphasised that "How Do You Live" was a tentative title.
> I'm irked by this because this is something I've been constantly correcting people with, mainly to indirectly challenge English-language exceptionalism (anything not Japanese is English - we don't know the French or German titles yet),
This is needlessly pedantic. By that logic, your use of Romaji is "incorrect" and Euro-centric exceptionalism, because the official original movie poster uses Hanji/Katakana. (And in fact, it'd be "incorrect" to say it was released in Japan, because in Japan, they'd say it was released in Nippon.)
It's an English-language article about a Japanese movie. Saying "titled 君たちはどう生きるか and renamed The Boy and the Heron for the international market" would make no sense because the audience of English readers won't be able to make sense of it.
It's not "English-language exceptionalism" to provide information in English when writing for an English-speaking audience, especially when it's clear in context that the information is a translation.
Plenty of English-language articles about this film have already done a proper job of reporting on this (before the English language title was given), by noting that Miyazaki's next film is "tentatively" titled how do you live.
> While we're being pedantic: there's no katakana in the title on the original poster.
I think you're right. My Japanese is very rusty at this point, but I was taught that titles were always written in katakana, similar to how titles in English are always written in title case. But う is hiragana, for example.
> I was taught that titles were always written in katakana, similar to how titles in English are always written in title case
Whoever taught you that is wrong, titles are not written in katakana. Katakana is mostly only used for loan-words and onomatopoeia. English titles of foreign movies will be written in Katakana, maybe they were confused by that?
kimi-tachi wa dou iki-ru ka
you-and.others TOPIC how live-NONPAST QUESTION
“How do you live?” seems like an OK out-of-context translation?
Those are always fraught for cinema—the Russian release of Inception was titled Начало načalo “beginning”, which of course wasn’t the translation of the titular concept during the film itself (that was внедрение vnedrenie “integration, infiltration”)—but if you have to give something to an English-speaking audience, it’s probably as good as it gets. (Specifying the translation is on shaky ground would be good journalistic practice, of course.)
The comment above _is_ pedantic. It's stating that the name of the movie IS Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka, that could be roughly translated to "How do you live?"
Any other post about this movie, in any other language, is going to make the same "mistake".
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the context you're coming from, but I've always presumed that international titles are implicitly translated into English in English-language material. For the benefit of other readers: To my beginner Japanese–learning ear, "How Do You Live" is a pretty straightforward translation of "kimitachi ha dō ikiru ka". I don't think there's any subtext of English-language exceptionalism, here or in general, especially since this translation is so straightforward (except for maybe an English translation losing the nuance of "kimitachi").
Again though, I readily concede that your online interactions may be very different from mine—just wanted to add my 2¢ :-)
The movie is based on a book which was released under the name "How Do You Live" in English. So this may be partly because they didn't want to license the name, since the movie ended up containing 0% of the content of the book.
But yes, it wasn't renamed. It just has another name. Nobody's hiding the original name from you.
Maybe his point is that “How do you live” is already a translation and not the actual name of the movie. The actual name is the Japanese version.
Kinda like saying that Rome is not the actual name of the city. It’s Roma because that’s how it’s called in Italian and the city is in Italy so that’s the actual name.
> Kinda like saying that Rome is not the actual name of the city.
To be honest, I'd probably disagree with this too—the way I see it, in English, Rome is the actual name of the city. (It's not the "native" name, of course, but English isn't the native language of the city, so that's not relevant either way.)
I mean, by the same logic you could also change the name of people? If your name is Michael should I call you Michele because that’s how it translates in Italian? I say no because that’s stupid.
Still, even if the parent post is indeed technically correct I don’t think it really matters the same way it doesn’t really matter if you call Roma Rome or Milano Milan or Venezia Venice.
A further observation, to add onto my reply: The article prominently displays the Japanese poster with 君たちはどう生きるか on it. I agree that they probably should've given the Japanese title in the body text for clarity, but I assume including the poster goes some way towards indicating the presence of an implicit translation.
Who is this "correction" for? Is there an actual existing person who thought the title of the movie was in English, and not a Japanese phrase that translates as "How Do You Live?"
Just in case you are not aware, How Do You Live (the film) is based on a book, How Do You Live. The book was translated and its English name is just How Do You Live.
When something has an editorialized name change between regions, the first thing I wonder is if some media already has that name [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie distributors fear copyright issues with whoever released the book under that title in their market(s), or perhaps they don't want to give them such obvious free marketing.
The justification offered about 'people being tired of marketing' sounds absurd, and more like they are finding excuses to skip work because they are old & exhausted, and another step in winding down Ghibli. I expect lower box office than it deserves; even Hayao Miyazaki can't release a movie with zero marketing and expect no effect...