TIFF 2023 | Hayao Miyazaki invites moviegoers to dream with him one last time
The Hindu
The loudest applause on opening night at the Toronto International Film Festival was for Totoro, as it meant to the audience the premiere of Miyazaki’s latest film ‘The Boy and the Heron’
The loudest applause on opening night at the Toronto International Film Festival was for Totoro.
When the Studio Ghibli logo of the magical creature from Hayao Miyazaki's “My Neighbor Totoro" appeared on the screen Thursday night, it meant to the audience the premiere of Miyazaki’s latest and perhaps last film, “The Boy and the Heron.” For many at TIFF, it was the movie event of the year.
A decade ago, Miyazaki, the anime master of “Spirited Away,” “Howl's Moving Castle," “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “Ponyo,” said he was retiring from film and that 2013's “The Wind That Rises” would be his last film. But Miyazaki, now 82, soon after began slowly toiling away on one more. For Miyazaki, who painstakingly crafts thousands of hand drawings for a film, it's a long and laborious process.
His work has been shrouded in mystery, in part because Miyazaki very rarely does interviews. Plus, in a marketing rarity, “The Boy and the Heron” has been released in Japan without any of the usual promotion — no TV ads or billboards — that accompanies such a feverishly awaited movie. (It will open in North American theaters Dec. 8.) Several of Miyazaki's films rank among the biggest box-office hits ever in Japan; there are few other filmmakers today as revered — and fiercely beloved — as Miyazaki.
“We are privileged enough to be living in a time where Mozart is composing symphonies,” the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said Thursday, introducing the film's first screening outside Japan. “Miyazaki san is a master of that stature.”
Miyazaki, who didn't travel to Toronto, has himself lampooned his inability to fully step away. In journal excerpts shared in the film's press notes, Miyazaki writes: “There’s nothing more pathetic than telling the world you’ll retire because of your age, then making another comeback.”
“Doesn’t an elderly person deluding themself that they’re still capable, despite their geriatric forgetfulness, prove that they’re past their best?" he adds. "You bet it does.”