By Travis Johnson
Legendary animator and serial retirer (that is now a word) Hayao Miyazaki has announced that he wants to make one more feature film – a mere three years after he supposedly hung up his pencils and paintbrushes for good
The My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away director said during a Japanese television special that he was unhappy with Kemushi no Boro (Boro the Caterpillar), a CGI short he’d been working on for the Ghibli Museum, and suggested that it might work better expanded to feature length. A concept that Miyazaki has ruminated on for a good 20 years, the film concerns a tiny caterpillar so minuscule that “…it may be easily squished between your fingers.”
That’s all the plot details at hand right now, but we do know that the film is expected to take about five years to complete, according to Miyazaki himself, which would put its debut somewhere in the temporal neighbourhood for the Tokyo Olympics, which is certainly good timing. It also means that Miyazaki would be 80 when the film is finished. While Studio Ghibli have made no official announcement, even the vaguest possibility of a new Miyazaki film is a reason to be cheerful.
