Hayao Miyazaki's How Do You Live? , which brought the legend out of retirement, will premiere in 2023

How Do You Live?, the movie Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki "came out of retirement" to make and that's also being produced at a rate of 12 minutes of animation per year, is officially coming to theaters in 2023.

Studio Ghibli announced Tuesday that the long-in-the-works project has a release date in Japan for July 14, 2023. The news came with an image from the famed animation studio behind such beloved titles as Kiki's Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke, that of a bird with blue and white feathers.

This also means the announcement of a U.S. premiere date is not far behind. GKIDS has been releasing Ghibli titles in theaters and via home release for years. HBO Max is currently the streaming destination for Studio Ghibli.

How Do You Live? is the tentative English-language title for the piece. Toshio Suzuki, a producer at Studio Ghibli, previously told EW in a 2020 interview that the film is "a big, fantastical story."

It's inspired by author Genzaburo Yoshino's 1937 novel, which became available for the first time in English with the October 2021 release, by way of translator Bruno Navasky.

The book is set in a pre-war Japan and follows 15-year-old Copper, who's pondering life's meaty questions after suffering the loss of his father. Moving between Copper's story and his uncle's journal entries, the teen embarks on a journey of philosophical enlightenment to determine the best way to live.

Jason Merritt/WireImage; Studio Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki and a piece of art from his new movie 'How Do You Live?', coming to theaters in 2023.

Miyazaki has toyed with retirement for years, which is why we use the phrase loosely. After saying he would officially do so in 2013, he ended up wanting to making another movie that would become How Do You Live?

"Many directors make films on and on and on throughout their careers as they grow older," Suzuki told EW. "When Miyazaki came back and said that I want to make a film again, I actually said that's not a great idea because he's achieved so much already. You can't come back and do something that you've already done in the past, you have to do something different. One of the ideas that came out from that was, why not spend more time and spend more money [to make a film]? So, that's one of the new approaches."

Suzuki also divulged to EW at the time that it takes the animators much longer to make How Do You Live? because they are hand-drawing more frames, compared to the days of Studio Ghibli's first movies.

"[For] the current film that Hayao Miyazaki is working on, we have 60 animators, but we are only able to come up with one minute of animation in a month," he explained at the time. "That means 12 months a year, you get 12 minutes worth of movie." In 2020, Suzuki said the had been working on the film for three years, producing 36 minutes of animation. "We're hoping it will finish in the next three years," he said.

It will be three years after those remarks in 2023. And whaddya know? That's when the movie is coming out.

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