The Boy and the Heron wins Hayao Miyazaki his second Best Animated Feature Award at Oscars 2024

In 2023, when Hayao Miyazaki’s last animated feature film, The Boy and the Heron, came out, the movie was highly regarded as one of his best works and won several Oscars nominations.

Now, the film led Miyazaki to take the Best Animated Featured category at the 2024 Oscar Awards, so he proved to be a top-class director among other great creatives.

Miyazaki has won two Oscars for filmmaking, first in 2003 for Spirited Away, and now in 2024 at the age of 83 years old. From this honor, he has been rewarded with one more huge recognition for his career. There is no doubt that the animation done by Studio Ghibli is another powerful example of their ability to tell stories while crafting unforgettable images.

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The Boy and The Heron wins Best Animated Featured Award at Oscars 2024

The Boy and The Heron won Best Animated Featured Award at the Oscars 2024. Directed by legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki at age 83 and produced by the Japanese company Studio Ghibli, known for its legendary motion pictures.

It is also Miyazaki's second award at the Oscars, having one in 2003 for Spirited Away and also an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, which was another Studio Ghibli production and the first one for that company as well.

The Academy nominated this Studio Ghibli production in 10 different categories, including Documentary Feature Film, Documentary Short Film, International Feature Film, Makeup and Hairstyling, Music (Original Score), Music (Original Song), Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film, and Sound and Visual Effects.

This is another triumph for Studio Ghibli and Japanese animation as a whole, further cementing their impact and influence in pop culture in recent years.

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The premise and success of the film

An image of the film (Image via Studio Ghibli).

Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement from filming in September 2013, but after the 2018 short film Boro the Caterpillar, he started to become a lot more vocal about wanting to do a new project. This film was said to project loosely inspired by the 1937 novel of the same name written by Genzaburō Yoshino, although it is worth pointing out that it is not really an adaptation.

IMDB lists the story of the film as follows:

"A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning. A semi-autobiographical fantasy from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki."

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