At 75 years of age, Hayao Miyazaki is pressing pause on his retirement.
In 2013, after finishing The Wind Rises, the Japanese animator and director announced that he would stop working. However, after playing with a few small projects, Miyazaki announced on Japanese TV that he wanted one last go at making a feature film.
Hayao Miyazaki has come out of retirement, reinvigorating a story he has worked on for 20 years about Boro The Caterpillar – Kemushi no Boro.
Although Miyazaki has been working on the caterpillar story for almost a quarter of his life, he’s never given details about it other than it is “a story of a tiny, hairy caterpillar, so tiny that it may be easily squished between your fingers.”
Despite, the fact that the feature film hasn’t officially been approved, Miyazaki is keen to continue animating.
“I do want to continue making short films such as the ones we show at the Ghibli Museum. I will continue making those. We will continue to make short films for the Ghibli Museum with a small staff of animators. But I think gradually it will quietly disappear in the future” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli estimate that a full-feature film will take five years, meaning that it will be released just before the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and after the artist’s 80th birthday.
