News
Hayao Miyazaki Considers Drawing Porco Rosso Sequel (Updated)
posted on by Egan Loo
The July issue of Model Graphix magazine revealed last Monday that Studio Ghibli co-founder and director Hayao Miyazaki is considering whether to draw Porco Rosso: The Last Sortie, a sequel to his Porco Rosso film. The potential sequel will have the title character piloting a Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bomber from Italy, although the magazine says that Miyazaki will first see the Campini-Caproni experimental aircraft at Italy's Museo storico dell'Aeronautica Militare di Vigna di Valle at an unknown future date.
Miyazaki drew an irregularly serialized collection of manga and graphical essays called Zassō Note (Daydream Data Notes) in the same magazine from 1984 to 1992. Viz republished "Hikōtei Jidai" (The Age of the Flying Boat), Zassō Note's 1990 prototype manga story for Miyazaki's Porco Rosso film, in English in Animerica Magazine. The years that Miyazaki started and ended his Zassō Note run are not coincidental; his first Ghibli movie, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, opened in 1984, while Porco Rosso opened in 1992. Miyazaki also drew a two-part "Kaze Tachinu" (The Wind Rises) mini-series about the designer of Japan's World-War-II-era Zero fighter in Model Graphix earlier this year.
Miyazaki previously directed Ghibli Museum's "Mei to Konekobasu" short, an unofficial 2003 continuation of his My Neighbor Totoro film classic (1988). Hiroyuki Morita directed 2002's The Cat Returns, Ghibli's film based on Aoi Hiiragi's Baron: The Cat Returns companion manga to her Whisper of the Heart manga (1989). The Whisper of the Heart manga inspired Yoshifumi Kondô and Ghibli's 1995 film of the same name. In 1995, a live-action television special was made of Umi ga Kikoeru II: Ai ga Aru Kara, the sequel book to Saeko Himuro's Umi ga Kikoeru (Ocean Waves) novel. Tomomi Mochizuki oversaw an anime adaptation of Ocean Waves at Ghibli in 1993, but neither Mochizuki nor Ghibli was involved in the live-action sequel. Miyazaki's newest film, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, is slated to open in North America on August 14.
Source: Nausicaa.net
Image ©1992 Nibariki • TNNG
Update: "Kaze Tachinu" is now a continuing series instead of a two-part series as previously announced in March. Thanks, toru.
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