a new statuette in the form of an apotheosis for Hayao Miyazaki for his animated film “The Boy and the Heron”

At 83, Hayao Miyazaki proves that he has retained all his talent and his old-fashioned 2D techniques, at a time of the triumph of computer-generated images.

It’s a prize in the form of an apotheosis for Hayao Miyazaki, the patriarch of Japanese animation: The Boy and the Heronhis latest film, won the Oscar for best animated film on Sunday March 11, as already his Spirited Away in 2003. What perhaps encourages the 83-year-old master of the legendary Studio Ghibli not to take his artistic retirement yet, which he had already announced before returning to his drawing board for this project. However, ten years passed between the release of this last film and its previous opus, The wind picks up.

“It was good”

Cultivating discretion, Miyazaki was absent from the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood and also did not appear at a Ghibli press conference Monday in Tokyo, leaving Toshio Suzuki, another studio executive, to speak in his place. Hayao Miyazaki welcomed his new Oscar victory with restraint, to hide his joy: he was “normal” and simply stated that it was “GOOD” to have won, according to Toshio Suzuki, who spoke to him on the phone.

“I don’t think it will be easy [pour lui] to make a new feature film”, Toshio Suzuki further estimated. But “Miyazaki has made animated shorts in the past, so I would like him to go that route again now” he added.

“He [Miyazaki] says his eyesight has become poor and his arms no longer work. But if you asked me what I think, I’d tell you he’s exaggerating! To me, he looks full of energy.”

Tashio Suzuki, producer at Studio Ghibli

With The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki, a perfectionist craftsman who helped give animation its nobility, proves that he has kept all his talent and his old-fashioned 2D techniques, at a time of the triumph of computer-generated images.

Looking for a successor

The film is imbued with dreaminess and magic, as is often the case with Miyazaki, and contains autobiographical elements as in The wind picks up, taking place during the traumatic time of his childhood, World War II. After the death of his mother in a fire in Tokyo, Mahito, a young boy, moves to the countryside with his father and stepmother, who is none other than the child’s aunt. In this new, complicated environment for him, Mahito meets a gray heron who will encourage him to dive into a parallel world, populated by a fantastic and frightening bestiary, in which the boy will discover secrets from his family history and make choices. crucial.

“This universe comes mainly from my memories”, Miyazaki said last year, explaining that he too had lived as a child in a large country house to escape bombing during the war. “The truth about life is not something luminous, or right. It contains everything, including an element of the grotesque”, he also declared. “It was time to create a work by extracting things hidden deep within myself.” In The Boy and the Heronan old guardian of the balance of the magical world, which is collapsing, is looking for a successor.

In a documentary by the Japanese public channel NHK broadcast in December, Miyazaki explained that he was inspired for this character by Isao Takahata, co-founder with him of Studio Ghibli and who died in 2018. The two men had a relationship “love-hate”, confided Miyazaki. Perhaps we should also see it as a metaphor for the thorny question of the artistic future of Ghibli, while his eldest son Goro Miyazaki has given up on taking the helm.

At the end of last year, Ghibli became a subsidiary of the Japanese television channel Nippon TV, which is committed to “protect the know-how and value of the brand” of the studio and to respect its autonomy.