How appropriate that this year’s installment of a festival called “Animation Is Film” would kick off with the US IMAX premiere of the first film in a decade from the most renowned animation filmmaker of all time at the most iconic movie theater in the world. The excitement is doubled for me, someone who has dedicated his life to Japanese animation more than anything else. After all, it goes without saying that the filmmaker I speak of is 82-year-old perpetually-unretiring anime luminary Hayao Miyazaki.
Although Animation Is Film is always held in the TCL Chinese Theatres, it’s usually confined to the much smaller “Chinese 6 Theatres” upstairs rather than the ornate symbol of Hollywood housing one of the most massive IMAX screens in Southern California. For the first time, for this special opening night event two nights before the festival kicks off in earnest (likely timed in this way because the Chinese Theatre simply couldn’t afford to give up its flagship screen for a Thursday-Sunday weekend), our little festival gets to take over Hollywood proper.
This is the power of Miyazaki. Animation Is Film is a phenomenal event each year. It brings world premieres, filmmakers from around the world, and exclusive content. The Boy and the Heron featured none of that.
You’ll notice the qualifiers to this “premiere” that I’ve borrowed from its official promotion at this festival. The film has been enjoying wide box office for months in its home country across all formats, its international (and North American) premiere was in Toronto, and it has even been shown elsewhere in the US before we were finally able to get a showing in LA. A new Miyazaki movie isn’t going to wait for this relatively small festival to come along in late October – organized by its international distributor or not – when these much more established and prestigious festivals will give it greater press earlier in the post-domestic release period. I think they probably could have claimed “LA Premiere,” “California Premiere,” or probably even “West Coast Premiere” as some of this year’s other entries are listed, but perhaps the fact that they were able to secure this “cathedral of film” for the festival for the first time inspired them to lean into the fact that, yes, this is technically the first time the film has graced the premium format outside of Japan.
Furthermore, while most of the festival’s other offerings – most of them premieres of a more significant nature – are packed with their main staff appearing for Q&As and red carpets, The Boy and the Heron didn’t appear to bring anyone outside of the US distribution side. As far as I can tell Miyazaki himself hasn’t made any public appearances in relation to this film, but while the Toronto International Film Festival at least had the vice president of Studio Ghibli around to reveal that Miyazaki’s latest unretirement has come before he even gave himself a chance to retire this time, we see no Japanese representation here.
So I’ll say again, this is the power of Miyazaki. On paper, this is the least notable event of the festival. That is, if that paper didn’t include the name “Hayao Miyazaki.” Add that name, and all of a sudden it becomes a phenomenon I haven’t seen anything close to for this festival. Like I said, usually the films screen in a much smaller auditorium upstairs, but even the most significant draws rarely sell out, the exceptions generally only at the last minute. This non-premiere with no guests of the The Boy and the Heron sold out the Chinese Theatre IMAX in minutes, hours at most, of the festival announcing anything about its 2023 plans. Eventually, demand prompted them to add a second screening on Sunday, albeit not in the IMAX auditorium, and that sold out at least as quickly.
As you can imagine from that level of demand and the lack of reserved seating at this festival (a practice that could perhaps be considered in the future), the fervor was all the more palpable on the day of the event itself. A massive banner of the recently revealed GKIDS poster of Miyazaki’s latest film adorned the sky-high faux-Chinese architecture in the heart of Hollywood and, for the first time that I’ve actually seen myself, the famous courtyard of the theater was closed off to the public while ticket holders had to enter through the side with multiple layers of festival and theater staff restricting entry. Sorry, tourists – it’s Miyazaki time in Hollywood tonight.
An hour before the screening was set to begin, you’d be hard-pressed to find an empty seat among the nearly 1000 available. Well, in fairness a large percentage of them (all of the best seats in the house) were reserved for whatever VIP-level guests decided to drop by, so even the earliest arrivals would have a great deal of the seats unavailable to them. Attendees kept pouring in at exponentially greater rates up to about half an hour after the scheduled start time. Apparently, the lines outside felt like those of conventions as the promised time drew near. I honestly have no idea where all these people managed to sit; from my perspective in the back row, they all came into a completely full theater and just merged into the mass of humanity at some point.
Last year I claimed that the festival may have underestimated One Piece fans. One Piece is big, but Miyazaki is on another level, especially for an animation film festival audience in Hollywood. It’s not that they underestimated Miyazaki – they did a great job accommodating this demand – but Miyazaki draws such high demand that a special early screening in a major hub like LA is more than anyone can fully handle. With that in mind, I’ll reiterate that I can’t imagine this having gone any more smoothly. Whether because of the rate at which it sold out or from just intuitively understanding the impact of the first Miyazaki film since the festival’s founding, the crew all knew to treat this like a true Hollywood event.
I keep saying that this is because of Miyazaki and not the film itself, and that’s no mistake. I firmly believe that, at least up to this point in the west, 100% of interest in this film has been due to Miyazaki’s illustrious oeuvre. In fact, Ghibli themselves all but assured the same for its domestic debut by eschewing all marketing and even information about the film before its wide theatrical release. An unbelievably bold decision that nobody else with a major distribution partner like Toho could get away with, I respect the move with all my heart.
Prior to its Japanese release, The Boy and the Heron had nothing more than the general information that it was a film from Miyazaki’s usual crew, a release date, and one simple sketch for a poster. There were no trailers, no posters depicting the actual aesthetic of the animation, not a single frame of the film available, no cast, not even any indication of what it was about. They kept it so close to their chest that no international licensing was announced until just after the Japanese release, at which point it was retitled for international release from its original Japanese title translating to “How Do You Live?” I like to joke that they were so committed to secrecy that they didn’t even reveal the real title until after its release, though at this point I’m not even sure that’s a joke. If anything, the Japanese title is an example of misdirection, leading initial audiences to suspect some sort of adaptation of the novel of the same name when in fact it’s a completely original story that just happens to show the novel in one scene.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that such absolute obfuscation of information around a new film, especially one not tied to a franchise, would be a death sentence until enough word of mouth spread to slowly draw out the stragglers. But remember that power of Miyazaki I keep bringing up? With that name recognition alone, The Boy and the Heron (under a different title) broke box office records in Japan from day 1. So yes, 100% of interest is the Miyazaki legacy in effect. Had this come from an unknown director, nobody would’ve cared.
But it is from Miyazaki, and so we do care. Nobody cares more than the winner of the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director five years ago and Best Animated Feature this year, Guillermo del Toro. Despite those accolades, del Toro’s Pinocchio, the film that would win him a very obvious additional Oscar a few months later and a premiere that featured the man himself giving a beautiful introduction and a Q&A so long the venue had to kick him out, sold out shortly before it occurred, a far cry from as soon as it was posted. Just getting to see what Miyazaki has been working on carries that much more weight than spending a day with del Toro for his new passion project. At the aforementioned TIFF international premiere of the film, del Toro introduced it, beginning with the statement that this festival takes as its very name – “Animation is film,” making the very safe claim that Miyazaki is the greatest director of animation ever, and eloquently waxing that “we are privileged enough to be living in a time where Mozart is composing symphonies.”
It’s a privilege that becomes all the more profound when the time finally comes to get to sit down and experience a new symphony, especially when our Mozart makes us wait a decade since the last one. As previously mentioned, Miyazaki is comically bad at retiring. He has claimed to do so after the majority of his films at this point, like the chronic addict who always claims he’s quitting until the next time. Following the release of The Wind Rises in 2013, great fanfare was made in association with his very official declaration of retirement, which he swore was serious this time. Not counting whatever other contributions he may have made to the studio and its museum, he didn’t make it two years before he was publishing new manga and writing and directing a new short film in 2015. By 2016, he had begun storyboarding what we would eventually call The Boy and the Heron, submitted its project proposal, and allowed this fact to become public via its inclusion in the Never-Ending Man documentary released the same year.
Said proposal is a hilariously self-effacing acknowledgment of that hypocrisy, wherein Miyazaki describes himself as pathetic, elderly, delusional, geriatrically forgetful, and past his best. He notes that moving forward with another film would create trouble for others, could be left unfinished while he dies, and would be unbearable for those burdened with the result. He comments that he could make a film in a year in his 40s (indeed, Totoro and Kiki were released only a year apart), but now it would take three, worst-case five years to complete one. He compares this possibility to the protracted production of Isao Takahata’s final film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which Miyazaki somewhat derided at the time in contrast to the relative expedience of his own “final” film meant to be released simultaneously.
At any rate, we’re all lucky enough that he, Suzuki, and Ghibli managed to make it through and release this completed film with no tragedy thus far. Just as only they can get away with putting this much money into a production and not allowing it to be marketed whatsoever, only they can get away with letting a film continue production for however long it takes with no repercussions. If anything, that fact makes the lack of promotion even harder to swallow, because it’s that much more investment that could’ve been totally wasted if the experiment didn’t work.
But that’s why all of this does work, and has for the past six decades of Miyazaki’s career, especially the four since he began production of Nausicaä, the film that would set the blueprint for 40+ years of Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki’s uncompromising vision has shaped the ethos of the studio so profoundly that such paradoxes become possible, and even wildly successful. Eric Beckman, founder and CEO of GKIDS and founder of Animation Is Film, introduced the premiere by contrasting the corporate American animation “factories” pumping out computer-generated commodities once or twice a year to the “artisans” at Ghibli handcrafting their deeply human art. We’ve had enough fast food; the chef has finally completed his dish.
The timing of GKIDS announcing the license to what was then retitled to The Boy and the Heron coming immediately after its Japanese release was likely no coincidence. In contrast to the Japanese side, GKIDS has been allowed to engage in some normal promotion of the film’s release in the west, so Ghibli almost certainly demanded that they at least wait until the Japanese audience was able to see it before revealing anything.
The unfortunate irony of this decision is that, while it preserves the well-protected secrecy of the film for its domestic audience, it only introduces infinitely greater potential for everyone else in the world to be spoiled about its contents from that initial audience, since the international distributor isn’t able to start their part of the process until the film is already out in the wild. I think it’s a little insane that, in 2023, we still get virtually no simultaneous American releases of Japanese films, but this specific scenario particularly exacerbates that paradigm, resulting in the wide US release scheduled for December. That’s about five months of audiences having to dodge potential spoilers for a film that was made to be impossible to spoil. It was a nice idea, but maybe next time consider that not everyone in the world lives in Japan (or the US for that matter; many other countries will likely be waiting even longer).
Nevertheless, in keeping with the spirit of Suzuki’s original intentions, I made every effort to avoid learning anything about the film until I was able to watch it in full. I never watched the trailer GKIDS released, I only saw a few screenshots out of context, and I didn’t know who any of the characters were until the dub cast was announced the day prior to this screening (and even then, the annoying need for companies to promote stunt casting by level of celebrity rather than prominence other further confused who the main characters might be). I successfully managed to avoid any spoilers or even the plot synopsis right up to this screening.
By that same token, I’d like for as many people to go into it with the same clean slate, so I won’t be sharing anything about the film itself. The most I’ll say is that it’s an unconventional enough work that the less you know, the more profound the impact. At this point there’s plenty of material out there to learn more about the film ahead of time if you want, but if you’ve made it this far without delving in, I highly encourage you to keep holding out.
All of this talk of Miyazaki’s legacy comes with an obvious drawback: the standards are so high that it’s almost impossible for anyone to live up to them. If demand is so high that screenings can sell out worldwide instantly without any obligation or even knowledge of what the film is about, those hungry audiences are going to expect this end of the ten-year drought to bring the greatest masterpiece they’ve ever seen, especially since it very well could end up being his last. That’s not going to happen at this point; Miyazaki has already created the best version of the film people expect him to make, several times over. Given that, the best thing he can do now is not give people what they want or expect at all.
Maybe you’ll watch this film and come away deeply disappointed after a decade of hype. Maybe you’ll hate it. That’s fine. Better that he use his twilight years to explore creativity anew than to try to cater to expectations set out for him and only invite comparisons to past works that executed his regular themes more successfully. He’s gotten this far by being uncompromising in his art, and to give us what we want instead of the new ideas confusingly bubbling out of him would be a betrayal of all that has made him the most beloved master of his craft. He is the consummate auteur, and that means you’re going to have to meet him at his level, whether you like it or not.
The Boy and the Heron opens in the US in IMAX on December 8, preceded by limited screenings on November 22. Watch it. Don’t look up anything about it. Just watch it. It’ll be an experience, I promise you that.
