Golden Globes: ‘The Boy and the Heron’ is poised to make history

Matthew Stewart
·3 min read
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In just a few weeks, the 18th recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature will be revealed. While it is highly likely that the new winner will share a 3D visual style in common with nearly all of its predecessors, voters may instead decide to finally honor a fully hand-drawn movie for the first time. Fittingly, this monumental distinction would be credited to the legendary Studio Ghibli and its esteemed cofounder, Hayao Miyazaki, who suspended his brief retirement in order to make his dozenth film, “The Boy and the Heron.”

With an original plot that pointedly references the classic Japanese novel “How Do You Live?,” “The Boy and the Heron” is the 25th entry in Studio Ghibli’s animated canon and the company’s 10th film released after the creation of this Golden Globe category. Although four of its post-2005 productions (“The Wind Rises,” “The Tale of Princess Kaguya,” “When Marnie Was There,” and “The Red Turtle”) earned Oscar notices for Best Animated Feature, Golden Globes voters have consistently overlooked the studio’s output, only going so far as to nominate “The Wind Rises” for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014 (It lost to Italy’s “The Great Beauty”).

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The animators who worked on “The Boy and the Heron” painstakingly created each frame of the two-hour movie by hand, thus maintaining the distinctive style their studio has cultivated for four decades. As of now, less than 13% of the films that have competed for the Best Animated Feature Golden Globe were (or made to look like they were) designed in that traditional way, with the earliest example being “The Simpsons Movie,” which lost in 2008 to Pixar’s “Ratatouille.” Indeed, 3D Pixar films have beaten 2D challengers on five occasions, including in 2010 (“Up” over “The Princess and the Frog”), 2011 (“Toy Story 3” over “The Illusionist”), 2018 (“Coco” over “The Breadwinner”), and 2021 (“Soul” over “Wolfwalkers”).

Among this category’s other primarily 2D nominees are “Mirai” (2019), “Flee” (2022), “My Sunny Maad” (2022), and “Inu-Oh” (2023). The middle two lost to Disney’s “Encanto,” while the first came up short against “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which does feature some 2D elements in its blended animation style. “Inu-Oh” was bested last year by “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” which followed “Missing Link” (2020) as only the second stop motion movie to claim this prize.

Several 2024 Best Animated Feature Golden Globe candidates – such as Disney’s “Wish” and the second “Spider-Man” entry, “Across the Spider-Verse” – incorporate some traditional design techniques, but “The Boy and the Heron” stands as the only primarily 2D film on Gold Derby’s odds-based top 10 list. Although 88% of our thousands of participating users agree that the “Spider-Man” sequel is the one to beat here, “The Boy and the Heron’s” second place ranking is quite solid given that it has at least eight times as many top votes as any contender below it. The fact that no film series has ever succeeded twice in this category also makes “Across the Spider-Verse” vulnerable – perhaps enough for its strongest challenger to swoop in and make history.

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