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GKIDS Licenses Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki Documentary

posted on by Jennifer Sherman
Special to screen in N. America this winter

GKIDS announced on Thursday that it has licensed the Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki (Owaranai Hito Miyazaki Hayao) television special for release in North America. The company will screen the special in winter 2018.

GKIDS describes the documentary:

In 2013, film director and animator Hayao Miyazaki suddenly announced his retirement at the age of 72. But he couldn't shake his burning desire to create. After an encounter with young CGI animators, Miyazaki embarked on a new endeavor, his first project ever to utilize CGI. But the artist, who had been adamant about hand-drawn animation, confronted many challenges. The film even faces the danger of being cancelled. Can an old master who thinks he's past his prime shine once again? This program goes behind the scenes over two years as Miyazaki overcomes struggles to create his short film using CGI.

The documentary premiered on NHK TV in Japan in 2016, and it debuted on the NHK World channel and website with English subtitles in 2017. The Japan Society screened the special in New York in September 2017.

In the program, Miyazaki reported that he wants to return to making an anime feature film, after retiring from directing feature films in 2013. The documentary shows Miyazaki working on "Kemushi no Boro" (Boro the Caterpillar), a planned CG short for the Ghibli Museum.

Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki revealed in August that Hayao Miyazaki's upcoming Kimi-tachi wa Dō Ikiru ka (How Do You Live?) feature film will open in "about three or four years." Suzuki also noted that the film has been in production for two years, and that the studio is doing things in the film that it could not do before.

Miyazaki himself had stated last October that he would need three or four years to complete his action-adventure fantasy film. Miyazaki derived the film's title from writer Genzaburō Yoshino's 1937 masterpiece of the same name. He added that this book is a story that has great meaning to the protagonist of his film. Yoshino's book centers around a man named Koperu and his uncle, and through Koperu's spiritual growth, it discusses how to live as human beings.

Sources: GKIDS' website and Facebook account


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