with singular directness, Miyazaki is the greatest animator the cinema has ever known because his movies — “The Boy and the Heron” perhaps most of all — recognize the agony that begs that question, and the ecstasy that comes from a work of art that inspires audiences to answer it for themselves.
And yet, the raw honesty of these movies has a way of making their imagination burn that much brighter, just as their imagination invariably feeds into the heartache and despair that Miyazaki couldn’t hope to express in any other way. If each of his films asks “how do you live?” with singular directness, Miyazaki is the greatest animator the cinema has ever known because his movies — “The Boy and the Heron” perhaps most of all — recognize the agony that begs that question, and the ecstasy that comes from a work of art that inspires audiences to answer it for themselves.