Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
With the Oscar-nominated The Boy and the Heron, the director has made his most political—and abstract—film yet.
Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about . This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was supposed to be 2013’s , a World War II movie about a man who loves building airplanes but struggles to accept the destruction they bring. The official was glowering, talking into his coffee cup about how Miyazaki, an avowed pacifist, should’ve stuck to fantasy and stayed out of politics; he found the
