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Rome Film Fest to Show Arrietty in Ghibli Retrospective

Studio Ghibli public relations head Junichi Nishioka revealed on the Karigurashi no Arrietty film's official blog on Wednesday that the 5th International Rome Film Festival will host a Studio Ghibli retrospective with six of the studio's anime films:

• Karigurashi no Arrietty
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• Princess Mononoke
• Spirited Away
• Only Yesterday
• Whisper of the Heart

The November 4 screening of Karigurashi no Arrietty will be the anime's first screening in a film festival. Also screening are several Studio Ghibli documentaries such as Yasuo Ōtsuka's Joy in Motion and Hayao Miyazaki and the Ghibli Museum, as well as the film Yanagawa Horiwari Monogatari.

The festival will run from October 28 to November 5.

In 2009, Studio Ghibli announced that it would make an animated film based on Mary Norton's novel The Borrowers, to be titled Karigurashi no Arrietty. This past February, the studio confirmed that Hiromasa Yonebayashi would make his directorial debut with the film. Arrietty opened in Japan on July 17 and attracted one million viewers over its first weekend. Nishioka announced on Tuesday that the film has been seen over 7.5 million times, an all-time record for a first-time director in Japan.

Arrietty is only the fourth feature film not directed by Miyazaki or his mentor and Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata. The other films are Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondô), The Cat Returns (Hiroyuki Morita), and Tales from Earthsea (Goro Miyazaki). (Tomomi Mochizuki directed the television special Ocean Waves in 1993.)

Source: Cinema Today via Tokyograph

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