TIFF '23: "The Boy and the Heron" goes into the unknown

by Cláudio Alves

Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron"

Hayao Miyazaki's last last picture before his latest last picture – already being discredited as such by Studio Ghibli VP Junichi Nishioka – saw him take on the model of a relatively conventional biopic. Despite its wavering between reality and dream, the now and the before, The Wind Rises represented one of the director's most straightforward efforts, doing away with the fantasy elements that defined most of his career. Had it stayed his swan song, it would have made for a career's closing chapter shaped like an intersection of culminating obsessions and stylistic disruption. The Boy and the Heron, previously known as How Do You Live?, posits a inversion of those paradigms. Oft-repeated ideas are invoked only to be collapsed, while tone and style return to the land of fantasy and dream logic.

Before reading ahead, A WARNING. This film will probably be best enjoyed by those who go into it blind, similarly to how Japanese audiences received it. If you want that experience, be satiated in the knowledge this is another masterpiece by Miyazaki. If you yearn for more, come with me down to a place that's no place within a time without time…

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How Had I Never Seen... "The Wind Rises"?

by Cláudio Alves

Hayao Miyazaki has been announcing his retirement for over a quarter century, each new project since Princess Mononoke received like a potential swan song. Such is the case of his latest flick, the enigmatic How Do You Live?, retitled The Boy and the Heron for the Anglophone market. After a lead-up to release that saw no promo beyond the poster, the film was finally seen by the Japanese public, enjoying its big opening last week. And yet, few folks are keen on sharing details about the animated project, including the narrative's basic premise. While the rest of the world waits for an opportunity to glimpse Miyazaki's latest "last" picture, it's an excellent time to watch the not-so-final career-capper that came before, which, to my great shame, I had never seen. 

This July, The Wind Rises celebrates its 10th anniversary, something worth celebrating as we prepare to see another auteur's exploration of an inventor whose efforts resulted in mass death during WWII. Not that Miyazaki's biopic of engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose fighter designs defined Japanese air force in the 30s and 40s, is attempting the same IMAX-sized scale as Nolan's Oppenheimer…

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1998: What if there already was a Best Animated Feature Oscar?

by Cláudio Alves

Mariah Carey and Whitney Huston perform a song from THE PRINCE OF EGYPT at the Oscars.

Before implementing the Best Animated Feature category, the Academy gave out three special awards over six decades honoring individual achievements in the art of feature-length animation – Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Toy Story were the honorees. It was only in the new millennium that AMPAS finally buckled to rising pressures and created the official prize. In 2001, this Oscar was finally established. As we ready ourselves for the Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1998, it's easy to wonder what would have happened if the category had been around a few years earlier…

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FYC: "Ride Your Wave" for Best Animated Feature

by Cláudio Alves

There's nothing more wonderful about cinema, about art as a whole, than the ability to surprise. If I feel a film showed me sights I never thought possible, if it told me stories I could have never imagined, it instantly earns respect and a special place in my heart. Following that line of thinking, one must say that no other picture in this awards season surprised me quite as much as Masaaki Yuasa's Ride Your Wave. Mixing supernatural stylings and teenage melodrama, the Japanese director has managed to create one of the most painful portraits of loss and paralyzing grief in a long time. If you thought the sight of a girl talking to a water bottle would never make you tear up, think again…

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Cartoon Saloon: A Dream of Irish Animation

by Cláudio Alves

In the past decade, Cartoon Saloon has managed to become one of the most important studios of western animation. It all started back in 2009 when the Belgian-French-Irish co-production The Secret of Kells premiered at the Gérardmer Film Festival. That medieval fantasy went on to conquer a surprising, though amply deserved, Academy Award nomination, as have all the studios' subsequent features – 2014's Song of the Sea, 2017's The Breadwinner, and this year's Wolfwalkers.

With that last picture upon us, it feels like an appropriate time to recall the short history of this splendid studio...

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