With The Boy and the Heron, the 12th feature film by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, being released in France on November 1 44 years after his first opus, The Castle of Cagliostro, hit Japanese screens, it is striking that Le Monde waited until June 3, 1993, to mention the filmmaker.
The French daily's special correspondent to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Jean-Michel Frodon, mentioned the spotlight on a Japanese director, "celebrated in his country and little-known here, whose three feature-length films are being presented to the curiosity of the 4,000 professionals and large audiences expected in attendance." Miyazaki had already produced masterworks such as The Castle in the Sky (1986) and My Neighbor Totoro (1988), which had yet to be shown. Porco Rosso (1992), presented at the competition, went on to receive the feature film award.
Is this to say that Le Monde was late to the party? By no means. While not early, it was a little less late than others. None of Miyazaki's films had yet been released in France. As they were not available in cinemas, they were the stuff of secret and rumor. Above all, Asian cinema was just beginning to make inroads in the West. In the years that followed, filmmakers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea came to dominate the film landscape, along with those from Japan.
When Porco Rosso was finally released in France in 1995, Le Monde gave it a rather lukewarm reception. In its June 23 edition, Frodon remained ambivalent: "Emerging from a cloud of praise, Porco Rosso, the Japanese-animated aviator pig, lands on French screens. His first contact is rather disappointing: The characters' graphics remain close to the flat silliness of Japanese cartoons, and the script, which pits the porcine hero in his scarlet monoplane against a band of foul-mouthed villains, seems to manipulate the same old recipes."
In support of the review, the evening daily featured an article by Brice Pedroletti, the paper's Tokyo-based correspondent, detailing the growth of Japanese animation: 2,000 titles a year on television, some 30 in cinema and one powerhouse, Miyazaki who, in the space of 15 years or so, "has acquired cult status for a writer-director and is racking up the hits" and become a phenomenon.
His feature-length Porco Rosso topped the Japanese box office in 1992. The correspondent reported that, in addition to his work, Miyazaki, together with Isao Takahata, another director, headed up Studio Ghibli, a name that was then unknown in the West but nowadays is much more familiar.
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