'The Boy and the Heron' wins Best Animated Feature Oscar
The 96th Academy Awards celebrated the brilliance of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's latest film, The Boy and the Heron, by awarding it the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. This enchanting movie, based on Genzaburō Yoshino's 1937 novel How Do You Live?, tells the story of a young boy during World War II on a quest to find his mother in a magical fantasy realm.
This marked Miyazaki's second Oscar victory
Despite rumors that The Boy and the Heron could be Miyazaki's last film, Studio Ghibli's vice-president, Junichi Nishioka, dismissed any retirement plans for the 83-year-old director. In September 2023, Nishioka revealed that Miyazaki is "already coming into the office with new ideas." As the most renowned Japanese animator in the West, Miyazaki has received numerous awards, including the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2003 for Spirited Away and two more Oscar nods for Howl's Moving Castle and The Wind Rises.
Earlier, the film picked up a Golden Globe
The animated gem had to fight it out with fellow nominees, the Netflix wonder Nimona, dialogue-free spectacle Robot Dreams, Pixar's Elemental, and smash hit Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Before this, The Boy and the Heron clinched the Golden Globe for Best Picture - Animated, foreshadowing its Oscars victory. It marked the first time a non-American animated film won in this category.
