Created in 1985, the Ghibli animation studio is celebrating its almost 40 years of existence on the Croisette: an honorary Palme d’Or will in fact be awarded to it during the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
A second honorary Palme d’Or for the 2024 Cannes Film Festival! And a big first: if it is already planned that George Lucas will be honored during the closing ceremony (like Harrison Ford, Jodie Foster, Tom Cruise or Forest Whitaker during previous editions), there will also be a collective prize awarded to Studio Ghibli, recent winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Film thanks to The Boy and the Heron.
If the adventure began just 40 years ago, with the release of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the studio was only born the following year, in 1985. Thanks to him, Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata, deceased in April 2018, achieved what was then impossible: independently producing pure masterpieces and conquering the general public.
Producer Toshio Suzuki, a key member of the studio from the start and quickly given a full-time role, assumed management with formidable efficiency, establishing a perfect complementarity between the projects of Miyazaki and Takahata, in turn producers and directors. .
From My Neighbor Totoro to The Boy and the Heron, including Porco Rosso, Howl’s Moving Castle, Tomb of the Fireflies, My Neighbors the Yamadas, Kiki the Little Witch, Ponyo on the Cliff and Spirited Away, Ghibli’s notoriety has continued to grow to reach an ever-wider audience.
Hayao Miyazaki on the Croisette?
“Like all cinema icons, these characters fill our imaginations with abundant and colorful universes and sensitive and committed stories”said the President of the Cannes Film Festival Iris Knobloch in the press release announcing the award ceremony. “With Ghibli, Japanese animated cinema is experienced as one of the great adventures of cinephilia, between tradition and modernity.”
Through this Palme d’Or, the event intends to recall its attachment to animated cinema, twenty years after the presence of Shrek 2 in Competition. While Pixar regularly presents its latest baby and Ghibli passed through the Un Certain Regard section in 2016, with The Red Turtle, co-produced with a European studio.
The press release does not, however, specify the date of presentation of this honorary Palme d’Or (during the opening, as for Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker?). Nor the talents who will be present to receive it. Hayao Miyazaki himself? Toshio Suzuki, producer and co-founder of Ghibli? Even Joe Hisaishi, composer of several of the studio’s films? Response, at the latest, in less than a month.
