The Boy and the Heron, supposedly the final film from Japanese master director Hayao Miyazaki, has won the Oscar for best animated feature film at the 96th Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
Inspired by Genzaburō Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live?, The Boy and the Heron is the loosely autobiographical story of a young boy during the second world war, searching for his mother in a mysterious fantasy world; on its UK release it was described as “a mysterious and charming fantasy that circles back to Miyazaki’s classic themes of childhood pain and grief” by the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw.
