Let me now talk about GHIBLI's activities abroad.

Up until now, overseas release of GHIBLI's works had mainly been limited in the Asian region, namely Hong Kong and Taiwan. This has started to change since about two years ago. The first was the release of "My Neighbor Totoro" in the United States. Soon after, 20th Century Fox distributed its home videos that sold over 560,000. This is phenomenal for a Japanese film having gone this far in the US film industry. Moreover, "Pon Poco" was chosen to represent Japan in the Academy Awards as a nominee for Best Foreign Film.

As many of you may already know, in France too, the picture "Porco Rosso" made its appearances in over 60 theaters. The voice of Porco Rosso, the main character, was done by the famous actor Jean Reno. As a matter of fact, it was recently brought to our attention that our director Miyazaki happens to be a great fan of Jean, and loves the character Enzo, which Reno played in the movie "Gran Bleu (Great Blue). " Needless to say, Miyazaki was quite pleased with this casting.

It is our hope to be able to bring to you more of GHIBLI to Europe and North America in the future. As long as the proposition we receive is constructive and rational, we are happy to accept. As creators of animations, it would please us the most to be able to have as great many audiences and to be able to make our audiences happy, regardless of race or nationality. But in order to have our work released properly in foreign countries, there are many hurdles that must be overcome. Many propositions that we receive are such that they want to just sell home videos or they want to air them on TV. Our priority remains that our pictures are made to be shown in the theater.

It goes without saying that we allow no alterations in the work that we produce. It is therefore quite unfortunate that we did not have enough wisdom and experience then when we made the "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind" because this was, without our knowledge, edited into a short version and released in the United States and other regions under the title "Warriors of the Wind." If any of you have seen this edited version, we'd like to ask you to dismiss it from your minds.

One point I'd like to note is that GHIBLI has not and never will produce a picture with multinational marketing strategies in mind in order that we may capture the world market. GHIBLI will continue its style to create solely for the Japanese audiences. And if situation allows us, we will then look toward the rest of the world.