It’s no secret that Billie Eilish is a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s work, so when the Grammy Award-winning teen released the music video for her latest single, ‘My Future’, fans were quick to pick up on the Ghibli-esque nuances of the animation.
In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, the singer-songwriter shared that she wrote the song with her musician brother Finneas O’Connell a month into self isolating at home. The song took two days to write before the siblings recorded it in Finneas’s basement for its July 30 release.
The song revolves around enjoying your own company and embracing self growth, symbolised by plants that sprout at a rapid rate from the ground as anime Eilish is lifted towards the sky. Hayao Miyazaki is notorious for painstakingly hand-drawing every single frame of his animations (a minute of footage can take up to a month to draw), so it’s understandable that some die-hard Ghibli fans might scoff at the idea of comparing his work to anyone else’s.
Produced by Australian animation company Studio Chop, the video may lack the finesse of a Ghibli anime; nonetheless, it features enough mesmerising visuals of dewy raindrops on leaves and otherworldly flora to make it clear it is at least in part inspired by the singer’s favourite Japanese animator.
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