Summary

• The Boy and the Heron won Best Animated Feature at the 96th Academy Awards, marking Hayao Miyazaki's second Oscar win.
• Despite tough competition, The Boy and the Heron's incredible writing and animation always made it the clear winner.
• Hayao Miyazaki's victory is a tremendous feat for anime and animation, breaking stereotypes and opening doors for future recognition.

Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, Academy Awards.

This marked Miyazaki’s fourth time having a film be nominated for Best Animated Feature, and his second win overall. The Boy and the Heron has been an incredible success from day one, and all of that came together at the 96th Academy Awards with the victory as Best Animated Feature, making this Hayao Miyazaki’s second Oscar after Spirited Away in 2002.

Despite the heavy competition from Disney and Pixar’s Elemental and especially Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Boy and the Heron managed to stand out and conquer the prized award, and its victory is a tremendous feat for anime as a whole.

The Boy And The Heron Swept Away The Competition

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, produced by Studio Ghibli, based on the novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino

In retrospect, The Boy and the Heron always made the most sense as the winner of Best Animated Feature. While Disney and Pixar have a reputation for dominating the Best Animated Feature category, Elemental was noted to be one of their weaker films, and despite the quality of its writing and animation, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was criticized for clearly being structured as the first part of a two-part story. The Boy and the Heron, meanwhile, had a universally great reception and told a complete story from start to finish, so despite the competition, it was always the clear winner.

As for how The Boy and the Heron earned such praise, that’s also easy to see. Beyond the appeal of Studio Ghibli, in general, The Boy and the Heron had some of the greatest animation and overall direction of any animated film of the past few years, and its writing, while confusing at times, still resulted in some of the most emotionally resonant writing of any Hayao Miyazaki film. The Boy and the Heron easily stands as one of Hayao Miyazaki’s greatest films, and its victory at the Academy Awards is justified in every way possible.

The Boy And The Heron’s Oscar Win Is A Big Deal For Animation

The Boy and the Heron winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature is a tremendous honor, and it’s also a big deal for animation, in general. For starters, The Boy and the Heron is the first PG-13 film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, with every other winner over the years being PG, at most. Animation has always had a bad reputation for being exclusively for children, so a film that technically isn’t for children winning Best Animated Feature perfectly refutes that idea and could lead to more animated films that skew towards older audiences receiving recognition.

The bigger deal, of course, is The Boy and the Heron being an anime film that won Best Animated Feature. Anime films haven’t won Best Animated Feature since Spirited Away won over 20 years ago, so The Boy and the Heron's victory shows that the Academy Awards are still willing to recognize anime. The Boy and the Heron’s win at the Academy Awards could cause big changes in how animation is treated, and with how great a film it was, it makes sense for it to be the one to start that.

Source: The Academy (X).