Hayao Miyazaki, the retired/unretired animation legend who is indelibly associated with hand-drawn film-making, is directing his first computer animated film.
The ten-minute short, which will star a caterpillar named Boro and will be displayed at the Ghibli Museum, is expected to take Miyazaki three years to make, according to a report on Anime News Network. It is not clear what stage the film’s production is at, or how much longer it will take to finish it.
“[Hayao] gets bored when his goal is maintaining [the Ghibli Museum], so he needs things to fiddle around with,” his son Goro Miyazaki said at an event last month as explanation for why his 74-year-old father was making a CG film.
Hayao Miyazaki Is Directing A Computer Animated Film
This is great news, and shows that at age 74 a great creator can embrace current technology and not be a complete Luddite like most people nowadays who want pen and ink cel animation to rule over everything (a trait shared with Ralph Bakshi, who's also [I gather] not a Luddite.) A tragedy that said short will only be seen at the Ghibli museum in Japan, though.