2024-03-15 12:20:28
When the Oscars were presented on Monday night, a crowd of about fifty people in a modest small building on the outskirts of Tokyo prefecture shouted out loud at one point. The Japanese animation Studio Ghibli, which is based here, has just won its second ever Oscar thanks to the film The Boy and the Heron. It was again brought to the company by the project of the eighty-three-year-old director Hayao Miyazaki.
The Boy and the Heron, an Oscar-winning film, was made by Japan’s most famous living director, Hayao Miyazaki. Czech cinemas also showed it. | Video: Aerofilms
As the AP agency writes, Miyazaki was already the oldest nominee for the award for best animated film. Now he has also become the oldest winner of this category. However, no photos of him from the red carpet are circulating on social networks – the director did not attend the ceremony in the USA. “He was very happy about it. We are very honored,” his closest collaborator, producer and co-founder of the studio, Toshio Suzuki, told Kyodo. So far, he has only spoken with the artist by phone.
Although the famous author of Castle in the Clouds, Princess Mononoke or Journey to Fantasy has announced his retirement several times, he has always returned, most recently for The Boy and the Heron. And even after completing this twelfth story of his, Hayao Miyazaki indicated that he had thus completed a lifetime’s work, he still did not retire. At the moment, he already has another project in mind, albeit only a short film, not a feature film.
Miyazaki rarely speaks to journalists, and he made no exception even after receiving the Oscar. All his opinions are conveyed to the media by his colleague Suzuki.
According to him, the director is a little ashamed that he announced the end of his career so many times. “In retrospect, he regrets the statement that he will not make another film,” says the producer, according to whom Miyazaki celebrated winning the award privately in his studio. He did not come to watch the ceremony between employees and journalists that Studio Ghibli hosted at its headquarters in the city of Koganei, Tokyo Prefecture, nor did he join the Japanese who watched the broadcast of the gala at a Tokyo multiplex.
According to the producer, Miyazaki lives as before, except that he recently shaved his beard. “He doesn’t want to look important,” Suzuki reasons. According to the AP agency, he thought for a long time why the American Academy awarded the film The Boy and the Heron. It tells the story of a teenage boy whose mother dies during the bombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. At the beginning of the story, the boy moves to the countryside with his father. There, he discovers a peculiar heron that lures him to explore an abandoned tower that hides a magical world.
Toshio Suzuki admits that academics may have been attracted by the line devoted to the boy’s relationship with his mother, or some Old Testament motifs. According to the producer, the fact that Miyazaki animated the film by hand also did a lot. According to Suzuki, working technology was better than a computer at depicting scenes such as the magical transformation of a heron.
The two-hour fantasy film, which Miyazaki has been working on since 2017, has already won a Golden Globe or a British Bafta award. Studio Ghibli unusually released it in Japan with minimal promotion. Viewers haven’t seen the trailer or photos ahead of time so they have something to look forward to. “We just wanted to film something we really care about,” shrugs Toshio Suzuki. The Boy and the Heron has already gone to international distribution in its traditional form, and Czech cinemas have also shown previews of it.
Hayao Miyazaki first won an Oscar in 2003 for the film Journey to Fantasy.
However, Miyazaki’s film is not the only Japanese success at this year’s Oscars. The award for best tricks went to Godzilla Minus One. The latest movie about a giant monster with radioactive breath was made by Takashi Yamazaki.
“For someone who is as far into Hollywood as I am, the opportunity to stand on this stage is almost unbelievable,” thanked the director as he received the statuette at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. “It’s proof that anyone can succeed,” added the fifty-nine-year-old creator.
Kyoko Shibuya and Takashi Yamazaki pose with the Oscars for Godzilla Minus One. | Photo: ČTK / AP
According to him, the film following the long saga of movies about the Godzilla monster tells about the effort to tame the monster, which metaphorically symbolizes war and nuclear weapons. “Perhaps the film’s success stems from the fact that people wish for an end to wars and nuclear weapons,” Yamazaki interprets the response to the news, which, according to distribution company Toho, has become the most commercially successful Japanese live action title of the past year.
Godzilla Minus One sold 3.9 million tickets domestically and grossed over 10 billion yen worldwide.
This is a significant moment for the country. The last time Japan won two Oscars was in 2009, when the feature film The Guide and the short House of Small Cubes were successful. A commentary in Tuesday’s edition of the Jomiuri Shimbun heralds the start of “a new chapter in Japanese cinema.”
Japan is also indirectly the theme of the main winner of the Oscar night, the film Oppenheimer, which was awarded seven statuettes. It tells about the development of the atomic bomb that the Allies dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. As a result, an estimated 210,000 people died by the end of the same year, according to Kyodo. The American film about Oppenheimer is yet to be released in Japanese cinemas.
The Japanese are also celebrating the success of the Godzilla Minus One movie with photos of the plastic monster on display in downtown Tokyo. | Photo: Reuters
The film by German director Wim Wenders called Perfect Days, which takes place in Tokyo and tells the story of the simple life of an ordinary toilet cleaner, also has a Japanese touch. The film was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film. He did not succeed, but the representative of the main role, 68-year-old Kodži Jakušo, received an award for his performance in the main role last year at the prestigious festival in Cannes, France.
Last but not least, the creators of the film War is Over, who won in the short animated film category, rejoiced at the Oscars this Monday. He was inspired by the peace appeals of the Japanese artist Yoko Ono and her husband, John Lennon of the Beatles. Their son Sean, who contributed to the screenplay, greeted his mother in Japanese when accepting the Oscar, adds the AP agency.