HASwhen The Boy and the Heronthe twelfth feature film by the master of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki, releases on 1er November, forty-four years after the release of his first opus on Japanese screens, The Castle of Cagliostro, It is striking to note that The world waited until June 3, 1993 to discuss the filmmaker.
The daily’s special correspondent at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Jean-Michel Frodon, mentions the spotlight on a Japanese director, “celebrated in his country and little-known here, three feature films of which are presented to the curiosity of the 4,000 professionals and the large audience expected”. Hayao Miyazaki has already created masterpieces such as The castle in the Sky (1986) or My Neighbor Totoro (1988) which have not yet been seen. Porco Rosso (1992), presented in competition, will receive the feature film prize.
The world is it therefore beyond the deadline? No way. If not early, he is even a little less late than others. None of Miyazaki’s films had yet been distributed in France. As they were not available in the room, they were kept secret and rumor. Above all, Asian cinema was just beginning to make its way in the West. In the years that followed, filmmakers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea took a prominent place in the cinephile landscape, along with the Japanese.
A giant and a phenomenon
When Porco Rosso was finally distributed in France in 1995, The world gives its author a rather lukewarm reception. In the June 23 edition, Jean-Michel Frodon remains mixed: “Coming out of a cloud of praise, Porco Rosso the aviator pig, animated and Japanese, lands on French screens. The first contact is rather disappointing: the graphics of the characters remain close to the leveling silliness of Japanese cartoons and the scenario, which pits the porcine hero with the scarlet monoplane against a group of awful bad-mouthed people, seems to manipulate the same eternal recipes . »
In support of the criticism, the evening daily offers an article by Brice Pedroletti, correspondent of the daily based in Tokyo, which details the sources of Japanese animation: 2,000 titles per year on television, around thirty in the cinema, with a giant, Miyazaki who, in around fifteen years, “has acquired the stature of a cult author-director and collects successes” and became a phenomenon.
His feature film Porco Rosso came to the top of the Japanese box office in 1992. In addition to his activity, says the correspondent, Hayao Miyazaki runs, with Isao Takahata, another director, the Ghibli studios, a name then unknown to everyone in the West, and today much more familiar today.
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