Apr 17, 2024

Studio Ghibli Receives Honorary Palme d'Or from Cannes Film Festival

The 77th Cannes International Film Festival will award an honorary Palme d'Or to Studio Ghibli. This is the first time that the Festival de Cannes has awarded an honorary prize to a group rather than to an individual artist.

It is also the second time since 2002, when the Festival began regularly awarding such honorary prizes, that it has honored people from the animation world. The other animation-related recipient was DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg in 2017. The honorary award is presented to a celebrity who has never won the Palme d'Or in competition.

In Ghibli's case, about 20 feature films produced in the past 40 years were recognized. These include "Porco Rosso," "Pompoko," "The Witch's Delivery Service," "Grave of the Fireflies," "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke," "My Neighbor Yamada," "The Wind Rises," and "The Tale of Princess Kaguya," which, in the words of the festival, "contain poetic, human and environmental commitments," and are "universal They share, in the words of the festival, "poetic, human, and environmental commitments" and "stories that are at once universal and personal. Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Hare" won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film. [Iris Knobloch, President of the Festival de Cannes, and Thierry Frémaux, General Delegate, said, "Like all icons of the Seventh Art, these characters expand our imagination with their prolific, colorful worlds and delicate, engaging narration. With Ghibli, Japanese animation has become one of cinephilia's great adventures between tradition and modernity."

Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, who founded the studio with Hayao Miyazaki, the late Isao Takahata, and Yasukatsu Tokuma, added in a statement:

We are truly honored that the studio has received the honorary Palme d'Or. I would like to thank the Festival de Cannes from the bottom of my heart. 40 years ago, Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and I founded Studio Ghibli with the goal of bringing high-level, high-quality animation to children and adults of all ages. Today, our films are seen by people all over the world, and many people visit the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka no Mori and Ghibli Park to actually experience the world of our works. Studio Ghibli has really come a long way to become such a large organization. Director Miyazaki and I are now much older, but we will continue to take on new challenges, led by the staff who will carry on the spirit of Studio Ghibli. It would be my greatest pleasure if you could look forward to what is next.

The Cannes International Film Festival, which ironically has zero animated films in its Competition lineup this year, will be held in France from May 14 to 25.