What happened between Ghibli's pause and The Boy and the Heron?

The pause began in September 2013, when Miyazaki announced his retirement from feature directing at the release of The Wind Rises, citing his age and eyes. Takahata completed The Tale of the Princess Kaguya the same year, When Marnie Was There followed in 2014, and the studio then wound its production department down, keeping the company alive on its catalogue, museum and licensing while its animators dispersed, some to Studio Ponoc, founded by former Ghibli producer Yoshiaki Nishimura.

The in between years were not empty. Ghibli co-produced The Red Turtle in 2016 with European partners, a dialogue free film directed by Michael Dudok de Wit that carried the studio's name into a new register. Takahata died in 2018 and was memorialised in a major Tokyo exhibition. And in 2017 Suzuki announced what many expected: Miyazaki had returned, and production had formally reopened for a new feature adapted in spirit from a 1937 Japanese novel and from his own life.

The Boy and the Heron was made in near secrecy over roughly seven years, with a large team assembled for a hand drawn production of a scale the modern industry rarely attempts, and it was released in Japan in July 2023 with almost no promotional campaign, no trailers in the usual sense and a single poster image, a strategy Suzuki described as confidence that the audience would come. They did: the film topped the Japanese box office, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the studio's second, and sold worldwide.

The same year, Ghibli became a subsidiary of Nippon Television, with Suzuki framing the step as succession planning for a studio whose founders' era had closed. The Heron therefore reads as both an ending and a handover document, and its Japanese and English disc editions, arriving after the GKIDS stewardship was established, close the current physical catalogue exactly where the pause began: with a Miyazaki feature at the top of the shelf.