Lucasfilm and Studio Ghibli have worked together for the animated short film “Zen – Grogu and Dust Bunnies,” marking one of the most favorable — and cute — innovative partnerships for either entity.
The hand-drawn short film, which will debut on Nov. 12 on Disney+, unites the delightful alien child Grogu from “The Mandalorian” and the anthropomorphized coal dust bunnies from Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning masterpiece “Spirited Away.”
Studio Ghibli sent fans into a fit with a series of tweets teasing the collaboration, first of a video of the Lucasfilm and Ghibli logos, then, at that point, of a photograph of a Grogu figurine with Miyazaki sitting out of focus in the background.
Disney at long last affirmed the collaboration in a tweet on Friday evening, however no additional data about the project has been released.
This isn’t whenever Lucasfilm first has partnered with an anime studio. Beginning in 2020, Lucasfilm recruited animation studios in Japan to make nine short movies for its “Star Wars: Visions” anthology series for Disney+, which permitted every studio to create any narrative it wanted within the “Star Wars” universe. Season 1 debuted in September 2021, and Season 2 — which branches out beyond Japan to studios in Africa, Europe and India — is expected to debut next spring.
The news of Ghibli’s partnership with Lucasfilm comes that same month the organization opened a theme park in central Japan devoted to crafted by Miyazaki, the studio’s co-founder and most acclaimed producer. Dissimilar to most parks, guests can explore locations intended to summon Miyazaki’s animated features, similar to the Catbus from 1988’s “My Neighbor Totoro.” Tickets are by reservation only and currently just accessible for domestic guests.
In the wake of retiring in 2013 with “The Wind Rises,” Miyazaki got back to Ghibli for his 12th animated feature, “How Do You Live?”, inspired by a 1937 Japanese novel by Yoshino Genzaburo. The studio has not declared when the film will be released, yet its president, Koji Hoshino, apparently declared during an October 2022 press conference for the Ghibli Park that “How Do You Live?” was “nearing completion.”
