By Mark Schilling
Tokyo: Opening on November 20 on 450 screens, Hayao Miyazaki's romantic fantasy Howl's Moving Castle grossed Y1.48 billion ($14.2 million) on 1.1 million admissions in its first two days -- a new record for a Japanese film.
Distributor Toho is now projecting a Y50 billion ($480) million gross on 40 million admissions -- a number equal to one-third of Japan's population. This figure, emphasizes publicist Yasushi Kanno, "is a goal -- though we are expecting Howl's to do as well as Spirited Away." Released in 2001, Miyazaki's previous film earned Y30.4 billion ($292 million) -- an all-time record.
Given Miyazaki's track record -- every one of his four animations since Kiki's Delivery Service in 1989 has led the Japanese film box office for the year -- Howl's PR team needed to drum up interest about as much as Bill Gates does when he releases a new version of Windows: The "want to see" factor is sky high. "We are targeting all age groups, from kids to seniors," says Kanno. "But because the heroine is a ninety-year-old woman, we are paying particular attention to older fans."
Instead of scheduling word-of-mouth-building interviews and press conferences, Kanno and his team at Major -- the agency handling PR chores for distributor Toho -- have been taking a feed-them-crumbs approach. Miyazaki is not meeting the press -- a first -- while the pre-release media info gave away as little of the story as possible. The film's trailer was also stingy with plot points. "Of course, many Japanese have read the novel (by Diana Wynne Jones), but the film is quite different in many respects," Kanno explains. "We tried to control information about the content to build interest."
To further this strategy, Toho scheduled press screenings far closer to the release date than usual, meaning that magazines with long lead times had to scramble. It seemed that even the gods were limiting access: An earthquake just before the film's Japan premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival on October 23 forced a delay in the screening of more than an hour -- and more than a few festgoers gave it a miss.
The overall campaign, insists Kanno, "is not low volume -- we're doing what we can to get the word out." That includes TV spots with food maker House -- a Howl's sponsor -- as well as the usual film books, posters and tchotchkes, sold in theatres, bookstores and, of course, on the Internet. "Is it more intense than the campaign for Spirited Away? About the same, I would say," comments Kanno, who has been involved in both. Why mess with a winning formula?
