Recently, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron won an Oscar for Best Animated Picture, but the man himself wasn’t present at the 2024 awards ceremony. Surprisingly, it’s not the first time Miyazaki was absent from the Oscars, as he’s abstained for very good political reasons.
First, here’s some quick backstory. Miyazaki’s masterful magnum opus Spirited Away released in the United states on August 31, 2002. Contrary to popular belief, Spirited Away was not an immediate smash hit in the U.S. As stated by Collider, it initially received poor ticket sales, due to very little marketing and extremely limited theater showings.
This all changed when Spirited Away was nominated for the best animated feature at the 2003 Oscars, and subsequently won the Oscar for that category. Miyazaki became a huge sensation in America, and Ghibli fever soon took over.
But, surprisingly, Miyazaki himself wasn’t pleased at all about this. In fact, he didn’t attend the Oscars to accept his award as a protest against the Iraq war. According to Rolling Stone, Miyazaki is a fiercely outspoken anti-war activist, and at the time of his Oscars win, the United States was embroiled in a war with Iraq post-9/11 that it fully instigated for imperialist reasons.
Miyazaki told the L.A. Times in an interview that “The reason I wasn’t here for the Academy Award was because I didn’t want to visit a country that was bombing Iraq. At the time, my producer shut me up and did not allow me to say that, but I don’t see him around today.”
Given that Miyazaki was alive when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his own lifelong experiences with American imperialism would have a huge impact on his politics. These experiences found themselves in Miyazaki’s later works like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, both movies with strong anti-war messaging.
As reported by Cartoon Brew, Miyazaki’s film Howl’s Moving Castle was actually about the Iraq War. That makes sense given that it is a film in which the world is suffering through a huge war taking a toll on the lives of everyday people. Howl himself becomes more and more beastlike as he participates in the war to protect people.
And though Miyazaki did not collect his 2003 Oscar in person out of protest, he eventually did accept an honorary Oscar in 2014 in America.
Miyazaki’s absence at the 2024 Oscars might be in line with his history of skipping out, but there might be a much simpler reason for why he didn’t go this time. As reported by ComicBook.com, Kiyofumi Nakajima, the producer of The Boy and the Heron, said that Miyazaki did not show up because of his old age.
Regardless of whether he shows up to awards ceremonies or not, here’s to many more years of Miyazaki’s excellence.
(featured image: Jun Sato/WireImage)
