Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron (pictured) walked away from last night’s 96th Academy Awards with the Best Animated Feature trophy—subverting many industry predictions that Sony’s superhero sequel Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse would win. Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Heron is the first movie with a PG-13 rating to come out on top in this Oscar category, which has favored younger-skewing films with G and PG ratings since it was first established in 2002.
It also marks a style shake-up as Heron is only the second 2D-animated/hand-drawn film to be triumphant in the Feature Animation field; the first was 2001’s Spirited Away, which was also written and directed by Miyazaki.
The movie’s New York-based distributor, GKIDS, was no doubt celebrating into the wee hours last night. The company has repped a total of 13 Oscar-nominated films in this category over the last 15 years, including Wolfwalkers (2020) and Ernest & Celestine (2012). But this is its first win.
It was a weaker year for streaming giants Netflix and Apple, which respectively had 19 and 13 total nominations. While Apple was shut out of the winner’s circle completely, Netflix took home a trophy for Best Live-Action Short for its Roald Dahl adaptation, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Last year, animated projects from both streamers collected golden statues, with Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Netflix) taking Best Animated Feature and The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Apple TV+) winning Best Animated Short Film.
Last night’s awards ceremony got off to an earlier start at 4:00pm PST and took three hours and 23 minutes to honor the year’s best films in 23 categories. US viewing data wasn’t available at press time, but the ITV-televised event was watched by one million viewers on peak in the UK.