Hayao

It could have been the perfect send-off – recognition at the Academy Awards of the artistry of Japan’s peerless animator Hayao Miyazaki.The moment The Boy and the Heron was named the winner of best animated feature in Los Angeles last weekend gave Japan a chance to reflect on Miyazaki’s towering influence, and contemplate whether the 83-year-old is truly finished making films.Studio Ghibli, where Miyazaki has performed his alchemy since the mid-1980s, had barely cleared a space for its second Oscar when talk turned to his…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeHayao Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese filmmaker whose anime classics have enchanted fans around the world for decades, has won his second career Oscar.At 83, Miyazaki won for helming the best animated film, The Boy and the Heron, the long-awaited fantasy from the director of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service.He is the oldest director ever nominated for the…

The Boy and the Heron, supposedly the final film from Japanese master director Hayao Miyazaki, has won the Oscar for best animated feature film at the 96th Academy Awards in Los Angeles.Inspired by Genzaburō Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live?, The Boy and the Heron is the loosely autobiographical story of a young boy during the second world war, searching for his mother in a mysterious fantasy world; on its UK release it was described as “a mysterious and charming fantasy that circles back to Miyazaki’s classic themes…

Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese are one of the most revered actor-director pairs working in Hollywood right now. They have worked in six movies together, their latest being Killers of the Flower Moon. In an interview with Letterboxd, the actor has now revealed that he introduced Studio Ghibli movies like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke to the director. Both these iconic animated feature films are helmed by the influential Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki. Let's us do a quick dive into his oeuvre to find…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeHow does a film that shunned all advertising break records in Japan, end up No 1 at the US box office, and become a serious awards contender? Because it’s a Hayao Miyazaki film. If you don’t know the name, make no mistake – this is a big deal. Miyazaki is the talismanic co-founder of Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, and his latest film, The Boy and the Heron, is finally out in…

It’s the film that the revered animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement to make, and it’s arguably one of his most personal. The Boy and the Heron is a strikingly beautiful, densely detailed fantasy that revisits themes and devices familiar from previous films and ties them together with elements that have a clear autobiographical resonance for the director. The dream logic of the narrative seems to have been born from the untrammelled imagination of a child rather than that of a man…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeHayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron contains multitudes. It is beautiful, tortured, whimsical, and stoic. Not unlike his 2001 classic Spirited Away, it blends traditional Japanese constructs with Lewis Carroll’s wit. An angry but vulnerable young boy, Mahito (Soma Santoki), is brought out to the countryside after his mother’s death, only to be tempted into following a gravelly…

The latest Studio Ghibli film is supposedly Hayao Miyazaki‘s last, although we’ve heard that before, the truth is Miyazaki seems incapable of staying away from the studio he co-created. The 82-year-old director has blessed us with yet another masterpiece in the form of The Boy and the Heron. Famously, the director announced that he would be retiring after The Wind Rises. Of course, he couldn’t stay away and so in 2017 it was announced that he was working on a new film under Studio Ghibli. A year before it was announced,…

The Boy and the Heron, reportedly the final film from Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki, has taken the number one spot at the box office on its North American release, as well as achieving record figures for the director.Preliminary box office returns report that The Boy and the Heron took $12.8m in the US and Canada on its opening weekend, putting it a significant distance ahead of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which managed $9.4m. In third place was another Japanese film, the monster movie…

When Hayao Miyazaki, the world’s greatest living animator, approached his longtime producer Toshio Suzuki in July 2016 and told him that he wanted to make another film, Suzuki was not enthusiastic. “I said: ‘Absolutely not. This is a bad idea,’” Suzuki recalls. He had his reasons. “I’ve seen many, many great directors, who feel that they can make one more great film and most of the time they fail. I didn’t want to see him go down that road.”Besides, Miyazaki had supposedly already made his final film. Three years…