![]() "But with The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki wanted to go back even further to his childhood." Indeed, the film's opening scene – in which Mahito runs through the aftermath of a US air raid on Tokyo – is inspired by Miyazaki's experience of growing up during World War Two. "The Wind Rises was inspired by his early days as an animator," he explains. It is, says Nishioka, a personal story for Miyazaki. Instead, as they sat in their cinema seats, the lights fading low, Japanese audiences found themselves with no idea of what they were about to watch: the hauntingly elegiac, often breathtakingly beautiful tale of Mahito, a 12-year-old boy struggling to come to terms with the death of his mother. The film has opened in the US this weekend, but when it was released in Japan earlier this year, it arrived amid the unorthodox decision – taken by Studio Ghibli president Toshio Suzuki – to forego a conventional marketing campaign. He will have a pencil in his hand until the very day that he dies."Įven if, once again, it transpires to be true – that The Boy and the Heron is not Hayao Miyazaki's farewell after all – that does not stop it from feeling like one. I don’t think he's ever going to really let go. ![]() "He is not physically working on sketches based on these as of yet, but I don't think he will ever be ready to retire. "Even now there are new ideas that he talks about," he tells BBC Culture, referring to reports that Miyazaki has already started work on a new film. Studio Ghibli vice president Junichi Nishioka is even more forthright. "Sometimes he would just come to me and say, 'listen, this novel is really interesting, you should read it!' and I was like 'what is this all about? What is he trying to make me do?' Moments like that made me doubt his intention to retire." "But I could sense time and again that he's not finished, that there are other things that he wants to do." Speaking through a translator, Honda cites Miyazaki's penchant for suggesting stories to adapt. "At first, I could sense that he wanted this to be his final project," veteran animator Takeshi Honda, who worked as The Boy and the Heron's animation director, tells BBC Culture. Speak to his colleagues at Studio Ghibli, however, and they describe a director as determined and demanding as ever a man for whom idleness is anathema, who will never, ever stop. With Miyazaki now 82 years old, his eyesight fading, his hands not as resilient as they used to be, you could be forgiven for believing him. This time is for real." Cut to 2023: the long-anticipated release of Hayao Miyazaki's final final film, The Boy and the Heron. "I know I've mentioned I'm retiring many times in the past," he told a press conference that year, "so I know that many of you might think, 'oh again'. – An indispensable guide to Studio Ghibli films And in 2013, he said the same the thing about The Wind Rises, a loosely autobiographical film about the development of the Mitsubishi Zero, Japan's most famous warplane. ![]() Then, in 2001, it was to be Spirited Away, the sumptuous mega-hit that announced Studio Ghibli, the production company co-founded by Miyazaki and the director Isao Takahata (who died in 2018), to the world. The Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki, a workaholic auteur generally considered to be one of the artform's most accomplished masters, has been trying to retire since 1997.īack then, it was the thematically rich Princess Mononoke, a record-breaking Japanese box-office smash, that was to be his final film.
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