Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, known for animated films like the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, plans to retire from film-making after a five-decade career, his production company said on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival.
“Next week, Miyazaki will have a press conference held in Tokyo to announce his withdrawal from active working,” Koji Hoshino, head of Studio Ghibli, which was co-founded by Miyazaki, said at a festival news conference.
Hoshino gave no further explanation for the decision by the director who is sometimes described as the Walt Disney of Japan.
Photo: Reuters
“I cannot accept any questions on this because there will be an official press conference on this. He wants to say goodbye to all of you from the bottom of his heart,” Hoshino said.
Miyazaki has made 11 feature films. His latest, called The Wind Rises in English, is already a box-office hit in Japan and had its premiere on the Venice Lido on Sunday, although Miyazaki was absent.
Based on the story of the man who designed Japan’s feared Zero fighter plane used in World War II, the film’s themes about the dangers of nationalism and war set up the animator for unprecedented criticism.
Commentators see it as a veiled warning that Japan may again be heading in a similar direction. Miyazaki, 72, emphasized that warning in a scathing essay in mid-July about proposals by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution.
Many of the director’s films have an environmental or feminist slant.
Among his best known films are Future Boy Conan, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and The Castle of Cagliostro.
His 1997 film Princess Mononoke received the Japanese equivalent of the Oscar for best film and was one of the highest-grossing Japanese films domestically at that time.
His Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature of 2002 and also was a huge hit internationally.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS