TOKYO — Beloved anime filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki is reportedly devastated after watching the 2022 film Morbius and realizing that it is identical to his upcoming film How Do You Live?
“I don’t understand. Why did no one tell me about this?! I’ve been working on my swan song for years, telling everyone in the studio that How Do You Live? is about Megumi, the Living Vampire!” Miyazaki was heard yelling at a producer at Studio Ghibli after watching Morbius for the first time. “It’s called How Do You Live? because it’s about a guy who has to learn how to live with a rare blood illness that forces him to consider drinking human blood once the artificial blue blood he creates stops being good enough. I mean it’s the same fucking movie. Don’t release a fucking image of this shit until we fix this. Say it’s artistic integrity or whatever, I don’t care, but we need to figure out how to salvage this. How much would it fuck us if we cut the whole ‘it’s Megumin’ time’ scene?!”
According to those who worked on How Do You Live? and compared it to Morbius, the movies are virtually identical.
“We thought we were going to blow people’s minds when we came out with the first ever live action Studio Ghibli movie. We got this really pale guy with long black hair and piercing blue eyes and… yeah he looks exactly like Jared Leto but Japanese,” Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki said to the company’s board. “The echolocation flying, the gloomy atmospheres, the best friend dancing in the mirror while putting on a suit. It’s all there. Hell, we even cast Tyrese Gibson as the one American in the movie to play our PSIA agent and I guess it just didn’t occur to him that it was the same character as the FBI agent he played in Morbius! Frankly, as a studio, we are absolutely fucked.”
Fans of the filmmaker praised the decision on social media, not knowing the true reason behind the move.
“Whoa. King shit. Miyazaki is so goated,” said one user on Twitter about the director of the upcoming anime Morbius film. “I’m expecting this to be the most original piece of art I’ve ever seen in my life. And as a culture, we really need it. There’s everything just superhero nonsense now. When Morbius came out last year, I really thought we hit the bottom of the barrel for society, so I’m excited, one year later, to sit down in a movie theater and watch whatever’s the opposite of that.”
At press time, Studio Ghibli executives were reportedly looking into using the crisis solution they always use when Hayao Miyazaki makes a massive mistake: just pretend it was his non-filmmaking son Goro who did it.
