Master Japanese director wins his second Oscar for story of a young boy searching for his mother during the second world war
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 of childhood pain and grief” by the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw.
While the Guardian’s visit to Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli office in December suggested that the 83-year-old director is not actively planning further feature films, Ghibli’s vice-president Junichi Nishioka denied that Miyazaki is planning to retire, saying in September that he is “already coming into the office with new ideas”.
Miyazaki remains by far the most high-profile Japanese animator in the west, winning scores of awards including the best animated feature Oscar in 2003 for Spirited Away and receiving two further Oscar nominations for Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises, in 2006 and 2014 respectively.
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