Thirty years after it was released, Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 anime classic My Neighbor Totoro will open in theatres in China on December 14, The Hollywood Reporter said. The digitally restored film will have a subtitled Japanese original version and a dubbed Chinese version, the publication added. This will reportedly be the first film by Japanese animation giant Studio Ghibli to get a large-scale theatrical release in China.
Set in postwar rural Japan, My Neighbor Totoro is centred on two girls who encounter friendly spirits in the woods. When the film was released in 1988, it earned only $5 million at the Japanese box office but became a fan favourite over the years, fetching more than $250 million from home entertainment releases and more than $1 billion from merchandise sales.
A restored version of My Neighbor Totoro was released in the United States of America in 2014 and in the United Kingdom in 2015.
