Heron

Image: Studio GhibliGreat news if you missed The Boy and the Heron during its initial theatrical run, and felt serious FOMO when it picked up an Oscar for Best Animated Feature last night: Hayao Miyazaki’s (possibly final?) movie is coming back to North American theaters soon. Alex Winter on His Character in Destroy All Neighbors This news was bundled in with a message on X from Studio Ghibli co-founder and film producer Toshi Suzuki, as well as New York-based distributor GKIDS. Director Miyazaki, who is 83 years old,…

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…

The world’s largest quantum computer system is quietly humming away, doing god knows what, in the middle of a low-slung conference room, just off the lobby of a building in Westchester County, New York.This is the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, which gave birth to the modern laser, DRAM, Mandelbrot set, Deep Blue chess-famous computer, Jeopardy-winning Watson computer, and a host of things that helped the astronauts land on the moon. Perched atop a hill in Yorktown Heights, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, and…

This year had some great anime movies and TV shows, and today, we're going to talk about my ten favorites, the ones I honestly can't stop talking about. In general, 2023 has been a year that has given us some of the best shows and movies in years, from the first season of The Last of Us on HBO to the second season of Invincible, all the way to the Barbenheimer Fest we celebrated in July. But you want to know what else it was? An excellent year for anime. Whether it was the new anime films that were released or the recent…

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 great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki recently cancelled the retirement he had announced back in 2013 and wrote and directed this new feature film. In movie terms, it’s the equivalent of Prospero super-glueing his staff back together and carrying on regardless. Does the magic still work?Well, I found The Boy and the Heron a mysterious and charming fantasy that circles back to Miyazaki’s classic themes of childhood pain and grief and how these were forged in the fires of the second world war. It also brings home an…

If you’ve never delved into the wonderous mind of Hayao Miyazaki, let The Boy and the Heron be your introduction to his many beautiful worlds. Miyazaki is the talent behind some of the most celebrated animated stories out there. He’s the reason we have My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle, to name a bare few of his range of cinematic accomplishments. Over the years, the 82-year-old Studio Ghibli co-founder has earned more than 100 awards, absolutely sweeping ceremonies with some…