Sep 11, 2023

-Hayao Miyazaki's Latest Film Completes International Premiere: Hayao Miyazaki's Latest Film Receives Unanimous Praise After International Premiere

Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Hare" had its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, and Western critics are beginning to comment on what may be Hayao Miyazaki's last feature film.

The reviews will be an important factor in whether "The Boy and the Hare" will be accepted by a wide American audience. However, Studio Ghibli has boldly refused to promote the film, and its U.S. distributor, GKIDS, has done only minimal promotion. There is a brief teaser, a few stills, and a vague synopsis written in the form of a poem:

A boy named Mahito

yearns for his mother

and enters a world shared by the living and the dead.

There death comes to an end,

and life finds a new beginning.

A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death and creation

,

a tribute to friendship

.

In the spirit of informing the audience of very little, I have tried to be as spoiler-free as possible in this review summary. We have included only fragments that do not contain plot details.

We read over a dozen reviews and checked a dozen more scores, all full of praise for the film. There were a few issues that bothered us, such as overstuffing and the word "complex" appearing several times, but in each case the critics were willing to overlook the flaws.

The beauty most often cited in the reviews is that the film is visually stunning. There is not a mindless word about the animation in "The Boy and the Hare" in any of the reviews, and many critics have said it is the best of Miyazaki's films.

Here is a closer look at what critics have to say about Miyazaki's new film:

Brian Talerico of Rogerebert.com compares the film to Miyazaki's other films:

"Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro," Howl's Moving Castle," and clearly deals with themes that Miyazaki has explored before, but this is more than just a blockbuster. This is not just a blockbuster, but a look back at the career of an artist. Without spoiling anything, and I will delve deeper into this in my full review to be released in December, the story is about acceptance, redemption, and the power of creation. It is a film that simultaneously evokes "Alice in Wonderland" and Miyazaki's own life.

Vulture's Alison Wilmore notes the differences between "The Boy and the Hare" and Miyazaki's previous work, but justifies them, explaining that.

"The Boy and the Hare" has an appealing dream logic that spans the lovely (a white blob-like creature called a walla walla that inflates like a balloon) and the dark (a soldier parrot looking for fresh meat). But what makes this work most compelling is the way in which reality and magic exist in equal measure. The magical world may be a means of escape from a burning reality, but it is not without the ugliness that those who seek to escape bring with them from the outside. If "The Boy and the Hare" feels less capable of appealing to universal emotions than Miyazaki's past works, it is only because Miyazaki is working on something very specific.

Peter DeBruge of Variety enjoyed the film, but wished it had deviated more from the Miyazaki formula:

"The Boy and the Hare" is unpredictable, but it falls into the category of Miyazaki's earlier work. He has done nothing to tarnish his filmography. Nor does he broaden the scope of his work as he did with "Spirited Away. Sagi is an obnoxious character, yet he is detailed down to the guano he leaves behind. He is a pink, green, yellow, and blue bird with dull eyes and bulbous nostrils. These are not the kind of gibberish creatures that people are quick to tattoo. The film is full of visual ideas, from a swarm of frogs to a nosy maid who becomes a warrior pirate on the other side, but mostly it is a reminder of how familiar the world Miyazaki has spun over the years is to ours.

In his review for Indiewire, David Ehrlich writes:

If "The Wind Rises" was a work of woundingly piercing self-reflection, "The Boy and the Hare," by contrast, is a searing work of self-erasure. Once again, Miyazaki questions the purpose of artistic creation in a world so prone to ruin. If Miyazaki had known the answer, he would have told us by now. He would not have felt the need to devote the last years of his life to a painstaking animated film that he feared could never be completed before war or death by other means rendered the entire project a waste of time. It is not a question of "what would we do without Miyazaki's genius," but rather "what would we learn from his legacy of failure?"

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter was astonished by the film's animation:

We have come to expect haunting images from Miyazaki, a champion of hand-drawn animation who has largely resisted the move to CG except for enhancement purposes. We have come to expect enthralling images from Miyazaki, who has been an advocate of hand-drawn animation and has largely resisted the transition to CG except for enhancement purposes. Yet even by his own standards, "The Boy and the Hare" looks stunningly beautiful, from the lush green of the countryside where it is primarily set, to the fields of flowers rustling in the breeze, to the gentle morning sun peeking through the grandiose architecture of the protagonist's home.

Virtually every perfectly framed composition can be a unique work of art, with the gorgeous colors and textures of the picturesque backgrounds that allow the viewer to get lost in them. Then there is the precise attention to detail and movement in the foreground, all stitched together into a flowing visual storytelling in which even the oddest elements come together as a harmonious whole.