Nov 30, 2023

Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Hare" named Best Animated Film of 2023 by the New York Film Critics Circle

The New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) has named Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Hare" the best animated feature film of the year.

The NYFCC is the oldest film critics group in the United States, and this is the fourth time that Hayao Miyazaki has received this award. He has previously received awards for "Spirited Away," "Howl's Moving Castle," and "The Wind Rises. It is unlikely that any other animation director will win an award at the NYFCC that can match Miyazaki's success. Only director Sylvain Chomet has won twice in the animation category.

The NYFCC Animation Awards are an excellent indicator of future Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature, even if they are not necessarily winners. In the year both awards were given, 19 of the 21 NYFCC winners were nominated for an Academy Award in the animation category.

The correlation between the winners is quite low. In fact, the last four NYFCC winners ("Marcel the Shell with Shoes On" (2022), "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" (2021), "Wolfwalkers" (2020) and "I Lost My Body" (2019) none of which have won an Academy Award. The last film that both groups agreed to award was "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse."

"The Boy and the Hare" is scheduled for wide release in the U.S. on December 8, and GKIDS will distribute both the English dubbed version and the Japanese version with English subtitles in the United States.

The Boy and the Hare is an original semi-autobiographical fantasy written and directed by Miyazaki about a boy who yearns for his mother and steps into a world shared by the living and the dead.