These include the huge woolly beastie of the title, hidden deep within the nearby forest, who would become the most iconic of Ghibli’s creations.
A celebration of the childhood imagination, it retains a freshness and originality that appears almost naive to modern viewers, and can be described (alongside 1992’s Porco Rosso) as the most personal and heartfelt of Miyazaki’s creations, with its setup stemming from an episode from his own youth when his mother was bed-bound with spinal tuberculosis.Ī rich fantasy world beneath the ordinary is unveiled before our eyes as the girls explore their new environment, full of tiny spider-like creatures scuttling through the rafters and other strange supernatural beings invisible to adults. Nevertheless, this touching tale of two sisters who move with their father to a rickety wooden house in the country to be closer to their mother convalescing in a nearby hospital has gone on to achieve classic status. Ironically, at the time, Totoro was seen as the lesser of the pair. However, it was the double-billing of his next title with Isao Takahata’s tonally quite different Grave of the Fireflies that really cemented the position of Japan’s best-loved animation house on its home turf.
How does Aya deal with these annoying adults? Please watch Aya and the Witch to find out.”Īya has been selected as one of four animations in the Cannes Film Festival 2021 line-up, alongside Pixar’s Soul, directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers and starring Jamie Foxx Flee by Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Josep, a film about drawing by French cartoonist Aurel.Īya and the Witch will be broadcast on Japanese TV in winter 2020, with details on the worldwide release still to be confirmed.Studio Ghibli was established after the success of Nausicaä: Valley of the Wind (1984) specifically for the production of Hayao Miyazaki’s follow-up, the Swiftian tale of airborne adventure, Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986). When I was thinking about that, I met Aya. It must be tough on our children to face all these adults in small numbers. Goro commented on the film's premise (translated from Japanese) that in Japan, “there are many adults and few children. Ronja was animated by Polygon Pictures and co-produced by Studio Ghibli, which has prompted many reports that Polygon may be involved on Aya, as Ghibli does not have capacity to produce a fully CG film in-house.
While Goro Miyazaki is director, his father Hayao is given a planning credit on the film, while he is currently working on his next film, How Do You Live? Goro previously directed Tales from Earthsea and From Up on Poppy Hill, as well as the series Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter, a computer-animated series which closely retains Ghibli’s traditional aesthetic.
The film marks a hotly debated move away from its renowned hand-drawn style, exploring how its unique worlds and characters come to life in 3D. The story sees an orphan named Aya, who is unknowingly the daughter of a witch, adopted by another witch and enlisting the help of a talking cat to escape her evil clutches. Directed by Goro Miyazaki, the son of studio co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, the film is based Diana Wynne Jones’ Earwig and the Witch – the same author of Howl’s Moving Castle, the basis for one of Ghibli’s best known other films.
Studio Ghibli has revealed first images from its much-anticipated upcoming film, Aya and the Witch, its first fully CGI feature.