The studio behind Totoro, Porco Rosso and more is not dead yet. But as Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki explains, the studio isn’t sure about its next feature film project.
“Right now, Studio Ghibli is open, but not in production,” Suzuki is quoted as saying by Oricon. “We’re worrying over what would be good to make.”
“If you think about today’s society, the idea of what to make becomes difficult.”
Continuing, Suzuki says, “I often believe that movies are something you watch, not something you make. The fun of movies is responding to what you see.” Suzuki explained that while mulling this over, he keeps wondering what the heck he’s going to do, adding, “Perhaps, there is a theme [for an anime] floating around me.”
How about have Hideaki Anno makeNausicaä 2? Or work on a Ni no Kuni sequel or feature film? I mean, if Suzuki doesn’t know what to make, perhaps he can ask that retired guy still hanging around the studio? He’s had some good ideas in the past.
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34 responses to “Studio Ghibli Doesn’t Know What To Make Next”
My Neighbor Totoro 2 : The Legend of Catbus’s Gold.
Ponyo 2: Ponyo Harder
Taken 4: Ponyo
yes yes yes please make a pnyo 2! it be soooo cool to make them about 15 in high school and ponyo is still trying to figure out how to fit in with other humans and her love for sasuke eeee i would love that
It’d be Totoro 3,
“Mei and the Kittenbus” is a shortfilm shown at the Ghibli Museum.
Not canon!
it’s written and directed by the man himself.
I know. I’ve seen it four times. It’s still not really canon. Even if it is, it’s not a sequel. It’s a fun little side story.
Ni no kuni 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – PS4
But seriously they should make more games instead 🙂
More Games even if its not a direct squeal to Ni No Kuni
Isao Takahata said he still has one more movie in him, I hope he makes it
Metal Gear Rising Revengence: The movie. Sure its a terrible fit for the studio but why not? :p
Another Porco Rosso! Or a follow up to the Ghibli made Lupin: Castle of Caldisostro or however its spelt.
I’ve always felt like Porco Rosso had many more adventures in him.
Miyazaki worked on a Porco Rosso manga for a while & was writing a sequel called “The Last Sortie” but shelved it some years ago. It was meant to have been directed by someone else, with Miyazaki doing the script & acting as producer.
Wow, that comment was a rollercoaster of emotions for me. =(
The rumor was that Hiromasa Yonebayashi (Arrietty, When Marnie Was There) was going to direct it and Miyazaki to write & produce it. Don’t know if that’s still in the works though.
Talk is that it might go ahead if things are favourable but Miyazaki isn’t happy with the script or the basic story outline.
He might just turn it into a fully fleshed out manga & then possibly into a film (or have someone else do it if he dies).
Whilst Miyazaki directed Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, it was made in 1979, well before Ghibli was founded (1985) & is owned by Nippon Studios.
Plus there are more Lupin related movies & series due out over the next few years.
lol! “Cagliostro”! But I too second that motion.
What about Nausicaa 2. The Nausicaa 500?
Actually I really dug Howl’s Movie Castle! How about a porn parody? Howl’s Moving Arsehole? No? Nothing? I’m here all week!
Miyazaki has said he has no interest in directing a second Nausicaa, however he did give his blessing to have Hideaki Anno direct a sequel, and Anno had suggested he was interested as well. Trouble is, Anno is busy right now directing the last of the four Rebuild of Evangelion films.
Laputa prequel!
They need to make a Nausicaä TV series following Miyazaki’s original manga story.
Miyzaki was also scripting a sequel for Porco Rosso called “The Last Sortie”, set during the Spanish Civil War but he shelved it for The Wind Rises.
Personally, I’d love to see Ghibli adapt Neil Gaiman’s “The Ocean At The End of The Lane” or do another reimagining of a Diana Wynne Jones (How’s Moving Castle) story.
AFAIK they’ve never done a sequel to any of their features, so lets hope that tradition continues
However, like most others, a sequel to NNK would be welcome on PS4
I’d rather not see a direct sequel to Ni No Kuni but rather an entirely new story, with new characters set years after in the same world. Maybe with a grown up Ollie in an NPC role.
It’s a game that I want to play again. I just wish that it had a New Game+ mode.
I can keep going on about the topic of Studio Ghibli, because the works of Miyazaki are my current Master’s Thesis topic, but will stop for now. :p
No sequel – we need more IP!
I honestly don’t care what they make. The entire output of the studio is so high quality that I’d be happy to watch anything they produce.
If you watch My Neighbours the Yamadas, you may change your mind.
What’s wrong with it? It’s exactly what it sets out to be (an adaption of a newspaper comic series) and it’s entertaining enough. It’s a very unique film and it’s a bit odd and it’s definitely not Takahata’s best work, but I found it to be quite enjoyable. It’s not what you’d normally expect from a movie, but that’s kind of the point. Takahata’s works are a lot more ‘arty’ than the rest of Ghibli’s stuff.
If I were to single out one Ghibli film as being the poorest it’d be either Earthsea or Pom Poko, but they’re only poor films relative to the rest of the studio’s output.
The art isn’t even close to the studio’s level of quality. It makes sense for the source material, but it’s really rough in places.
I gotta admit that I’d forgotten Earthsea, though. That was actually bad. Not just compared to the rest of the studio’s output. It was rushed, tonally inconsistent, visually uninspiring, and barely coherent. It’s also a terrible adaptation of the source material.
In fact, worse than being really bad, it was boring and forgettable. If you’re going to do something risky, at least take the plunge. Yamadas was different, but in the end it was a pretty solid attempt at a particular style. Earthsea was just boring a mess.
That’s the thing with Takahata’s work. He’s not an animator or even an artist. Unlike Miyazaki, he doesn’t do his own keyframes and draw his own storyboards and so on. He doesn’t even come from an artistic background: he’s a French Literature major, and got into animation because he was inspired by watching animated adaptions of French classics.
Because he doesn’t care as much about the animation, he puts more into the other elements. More arthouse-style films. And he’s a lot more willing to experiment with a different look if it complements his production, which is why the animation in The Yamadas and Princess Kaguya is so odd and striking (and polarizing as well).
I don’t consider Earthsea to be a bad film. Mediocre, for sure, and far below par for the studio, but it’s not bad. As an adaption, it’s fairly awful, but if you understand the backstory behind its production it makes more sense. Hayao Miyazaki had been trying to get the rights to do a film from the Earthsea novels for years and years, but Le Guin didn’t want anything to do with some random Japanese animation company. So he gave up. Then Spirited Away won an oscar and she suddenly changed her tune, but by that stage he didn’t want to do the film any more. Complicating matters was Howl’s Moving Castle. Miyazaki was originally not the director of the film, Ghibli had been expecting that Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children etc.) would direct it, but he pulled out of the project just when it was ramping up and due to the lack of a director capable of handling it, Miyazaki took over. So even if he wanted to do Earthsea, he couldn’t.
Takahata wasn’t interested and at that point they didn’t have a third director (Yonebayashi hadn’t appeared on the scene, Morita wasn’t with Ghibli any more and Yoshifumi Kondo was dead) so they ended up with Goro Miyazaki, who had no real idea what he was doing (no real background in art or animation), helming the project. I suspect it would have been an average film even with a different director though. Given the circumstances around it, I think Earthsea’s okay. It’s just not up to scratch compared to the rest of the work and it’s certainly not a good adaption of the books. As a stand-alone film it’s just okay. It is very well animated however. It’s completely forgettable as well, as you mention. All I remember about it was that there were dragons and one turned into a person, the main character is a jerk, and the villain is a parody of Michael Jackson.
I’m on board with most of that, but I can’t look past the flaws enough to think it’s a good movie.
Animation was great, but given the amount of art that was made for it, anything else would be bizarre (if you go to the museum they may still have the stacks of paper that each individual cel was drawn onto. It’s a whole room full of paper and about 5 times what they used for earlier movies). I just didn’t enjoy the art style or colour palette. That’s a totally personal preference thing, but if that were the only issue, it’d be a much better film.
The pacing and tone are all over the place and the dialogue is wooden. Characters are just kind of there doing things from scene to scene with no real feeling of why we should care. There’s no real characterisation or motivation that makes much sense. It just doesn’t work on multiple structural levels. I’m willing to give Goro a pass on a bunch of things, but the troubled production of the film doesn’t make up for all the problems. Trying to condense all of Earthsea into 90 minutes was just the icing on the shit cake for me.
You are pretty much right, but my favorite part of the film was Theru’s Song. It just struck a chord with me, and I guess I enjoyed it because I haven’t read the novels and could fill in the plot holes with my imagination.
Pom Poko was a good film, it just suffered from pacing issues and felt like it ran an hour longer than it really did. The story was otherwise solid and the environmentalist message is a signature of the studio.
I know some Australian stories that need animation, like Ned Kelly, that gold mining fight at Bendigo or Ballarat?, Gallipoli, stuff like that. Call it a multicultural expansion. It will be good for Japan, animation, and Australia.
I think it would be interesting to see the Grim Legacy in a Ghibli film.
That’s a rather worrying way of approaching the issue, which emphasises how important Miyazaki and Takahata were for the studio. Men of vision, ideas and imagination, capable of getting the spark of a new project from within themselves that would drive their passion. Without someone like them, Ghibli will become just another by-the-numbers producer.
I think that if they are running out of Ideas, they should send people out into the world and see what they come up with. I would love to see something new as well as sequels to several acclaimed Ghibli films; Whisper of the Heart or, Kiki’s Delivery Service, for example.
I really think they should check out the Warriors series by Erin Hunter, they could make at least a few movie or a series on that alone and nobody does cats quite like Studio Ghibli.