Ani-May-Tion: The Boy and the Heron (Dir Hayao Miyazaki, 2h4m, 2023)
Forty-one years ago this June, a small Japanese studio, named for a Italian airplane, itself nicknamed for a Libyan Arabic hot desert wind, set out to start a whirlwind through anime. What Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata, with Toshio Suzuki in tow did was change animation forever. To even try and sum up the decades-long reign of the legendary Studio Ghibli into superlatives, into lists of awards, is to know animation as art at its apex. Reader, if you've never been lucky enough to see any of their films to date, put the phone/laptop/device down and go watch just one, now - but for the last decade, the imminent end of Studio Ghibli, with Miyazaki not having directed a film since 2013, and with Takahata's death in 2015, has generated a book's worth of thinkpieces. Hayao Miyazaki, of course, treats retirement as a minor setback - Ghibli fans worldwide were edified (and in some cases, unsurprised) to discover that even this most recent fe...
