Anime News

'Howl's Moving Castle DVD'--Spring 2006 With 'My Neighbor Totoro'
Date: 8/18/2005
In a Website trailer for the just released My Neighbors the Yamadas DVD, Buena Vista Home Entertainment announced the Spring 2006 release of two more Studio Ghibli films directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro. Howl's Moving Castle, Miyazaki's most recent film, has earned over $231 million at the worldwide box office with a U.S. gross of $4,577,566, second among Miyazaki's films released in the U.S. only to the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away's $10 million take.



Miyazaki's films tend to do very well on DVD; Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a 1982 feature film released on DVD for the first time in the U.S. in February, is 2005's most popular anime DVD release by almost a factor of two. Spirited Away, which was released on DVD in April of 2003, is the 9th best-selling anime DVD of 2005 and another Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke, which came out on disk way back in July of 2000, is the 10th best-selling anime release of this year so far.



My Neighbor Totoro, which is a supremely sensitive examination of children laboring under the stress of their mother's serious illness, has been available on DVD in the U.S. before in an edition prepared by Sony, but the film is so good and Miyazaki's popularity has grown to such a point that it should also do extremely well next year. Look for Howl's Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro to be among the top 5 anime releases of 2006.
Source: ICv2