Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar Win For ‘The Boy And The Heron’ Is A Game-Changer For Animation And Gkids Is Ready To Reap The Rewards

deadline.com:

When Hayao Miyazaki’s long-awaited and supposed swansong The Boy and the Heron opened at No. 1 at the North American box office last December with a record-breaking $12.8 million tally, it was not only the first original anime title to achieve such a feat, but it was the biggest ever opening for U.S.

distributor Gkids. It kickstarted what would be a whirlwind few months for the now 16-year-old company as it took the Studio Ghibli film, (which had opened the Toronto Film Festival in September) to an enormous $46.7 million box office gross (more than double their initial projections) in North America and, later a Best Animation win at the Oscars. “It was the right film for the right time,” says Gkids president Dave Jesteadt. “The Boy and the Heron was Miyazaki’s first film in 10 years, and I think that a normal concern would have been if audiences had forgotten him, but it was quite the opposite.

I think his time away, from The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron, coincided with Japanese animation’s stratospheric rise in popularity in America and yet, there was no new Miyazaki film to feed that new audience.” RELATED: Kevin Costner Reveals The Epic Journey Of His Cannes Western ‘Horizon’ And Has His Say On ‘Yellowstone’ Rancor Gkids founder and CEO Eric Beckman says that across the last few years, “Miyazaki’s legend has grown” thanks to the globalization of content. “There are few people — not just in animation or filmmaking but in any form or medium — that have risen to the ‘godlike’ status that he has.

When we first got the film and we were positioning it, we didn’t want to compare Miyazaki to other animators or celebrated filmmakers.