The return of the animation king
INSIDE THE LONG-AWAITED NEW FILM FROM HAYAO MIYAZAKI, THE BOY AND THE HERON
WORDS JOHN NUGENT
Bird’s-eye view
REPORTS OF HAYAO Miyazaki’s retirement have proved greatly exaggerated. The legendary 82-year-old Japanese director — responsible for anime masterpieces such as Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle — has supposedly called it quits no fewer than seven times, before promptly un-retiring each time. Most recently, he claimed his final film would be The Wind Rises, an elegiac 2013 wartime drama. But sure enough, he soon found himself tempted back to the director’s chair with The Boy And The Heron, a very loose adaptation of the 1937 novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, about a child in post-War Japan who befriends a talking grey heron and enters a magical dreamworld. So what enticed him out of drawing a well-deserved pension?