Toronto Film Festival Kicks Off With Fewer Stars, More Masks and Miyazaki’s ‘Last’ Film ‘The Boy and the Heron’
variety.comBrent Lang Executive Editor The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off its 48th edition with the North American premiere of “The Boy and the Heron,” the first feature from animation icon Hayao Miyazaki in a decade and the picture that is likely to serve as his cinematic swan song.
The 82-year-old filmmaker isn’t doing any promotion for the film, so he wasn’t on hand at the Princess of Wales Theater on Thursday to look out at the adoring crowd of film lovers, who cheered every time his name or that of Studio Ghibli, his creative home, was invoked.
And while the applause that greeted the film was more appreciative than rapturous, the movie and its fantastical story of grief and growing up was warmly received. “For me no film shows the power of cinema as an art form that’s both personal and global more than the one you’re about to see,” Cameron Bailey, the CEO of TIFF, told the audience shortly before the lights dimmed and Studio Ghibli’s logo flashed across the screen.
He went on to tease Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” as the “…most mature, dazzling expression of his vision.” But he also alluded to the fact that there are sadder reasons to savor the bold and imaginative world the maestro conjured up. “It may well be the last we see from him,” Bailey suggested.
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