| This week, “The Boy and the Heron,” Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in a decade—and supposedly his last—opened in theatres across the U.S. There has been little promotion, but tons of buzz among Miyazaki fans—a combination of reticence and devotion that has marked the eighty-two-year-old director’s career. Despite the ardent interest that Miyazaki inspires, Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker, he rarely gives formal interviews. And yet, as with his predecessor Walt Disney, if you have seen a film by Miyazaki, you remember his name forever. In 2005, Talbot encountered Miyazaki at his Ghibli museum, in his native Japan—a facility with a naturally lit movie theatre and a rooftop covered by wild grass. She found the media-shy filmmaker smoking a cigarette and betraying “a profound dissatisfaction with modern life.” Miyazaki’s movies, including “Ponyo” “Princess Mononoke,” and the Oscar-winning “Spirited Away,” are nostalgic, “striking for their preoccupation with the environment,” Talbot wrote. The films dignify fantasy, but they also maintain a sense of wonder about the natural world as we might still recognize it. Miyazaki instructed his “Spirited Away” animators, Talbot reports, to draw a dragon falling through the air exactly as a snake falls out of a tree. It’s no wonder that the world’s greatest animator, who insists that every character be drawn by hand, is more painter than Pixar. “Disappointed, even infuriated, by the ugliness surrounding him,” Talbot writes, “Miyazaki is devoted to making whatever he can control—a museum, each frame of a film—as gorgeous as it can be.” | 
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