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English actress Florence Pugh has been at the peak of her career for quite some time now. From portraying Amy March in Little Women to playing Jean Tatlock in Oppenheimer, Pugh has gained a lot of love and support from fans and has become one of the greatest actors in Hollywood. However, what many fans don’t know is that Pugh has also dipped her toes into the anime world.

English Actress Florence Pugh | Credit: Instagram@florencepugh

Pugh has played the role of Kiriko, one of the elderly maids who work at Natsuko’s estate in The Boy and The Heron. In fact, The Boy and The Heron is Pugh’s highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes, crossing Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. In a way, The Boy and The Heron became her biggest movie for the year 2023.

The high rating of The Boy and The Heron hints that in many ways,...

Shohei Hino, best known to anime fans as the original Japanese-language voice actor of the Great Uncle in Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, has died at age 75.

According to Nhk, the veteran performer suffered a lumbar fracture during the summer. He reportedly passed away on Nov. 14, 2024, but his death was made public on Nov. 20, 2024. In 2023, Hino played the Great Uncle character in The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki's most recent Ghibli film.

Hino was born May 30, 1949, in Tokyo, Japan as Koichi Nihei. He entered the entertainment industry as a child actor, making his theatrical debut in Kozo Saekis Izukoe in 1966. His stage name, Shohei Hino, was given to him by novelist Shotaro Ikenami in 1973. Hinos acting career lasted nearly 60 years, with his final movie, Last Mile by Ayuko Tsukahara, released this year in Japan. In addition to his acting career, Hino was a musician...

The Boy and The Heron became a worldwide sensation at the time of its release. There were many characters in it, who caught fans’ attention, but the Great Uncle stood out for his headstrong beliefs and his domineering presence. The character wouldn’t have been nearly as convincing without Shohei Hino, the actor who played him in the film.

Mahito and the Great Uncle in The Boy and The Heron | Credits: Studio Ghibli

Unfortunately, Hino passed away on November 14th at the age of 75. While his performance as the Great Uncle undoubtedly left an indelible mark, it was not all he was known for. Hino had dabbled with everything from acting and music to theater and voice acting. Fans knew him from his different creative endeavors in life. There was no limit to his talents and he brought various characters and art forms to life with brilliance.

Shohei Hino Passes...

Hayao Miyazaki has been regarded as one of the greatest animation filmmakers of all time. The animator has worked on several Studio Ghibli films, which he co-founded in the 1980s. His films such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke have all been regarded as some of the best anime films of all time.

Miyazaki came out of his retirement to create his final epic The Boy and the Heron. The film was released last year and won many accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. While the film has many Easter Eggs that reference other films by Miyazaki, one of the most important characters is reportedly inspired by the animator’s mentor.

The Boy And The Heron Has A Reference to Hayao Miyazaki’s Mentor Isao Takahata A still from Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron

Hayao Miyazaki had announced his retirement after...

Plot: After his mother dies during WW2, a young Japanese boy, Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki), is sent to live with his Aunt, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), with whom his munitions factory owner father is trying to start a new family. Traumatized by the death of his mother and struggling to accept his circumstances, Mahito finds himself lured into a fantasy world out of time and space by an antagonistic grey Heron (Masaki Suda). As Mahito struggles to make sense of the new macrocosm, he ends a vicious cycle of generational trauma, ultimately making peace with his new surroundings by accepting the winds of change.

Review: As an animation enthusiast, few cinematic pleasures are more anticipated than experiencing another potential masterpiece from the “Godfather of Anime,” Hayao Miyazaki. The co-founder of Studio Ghibli is responsible for some of animation’s greatest treasures, including Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle,...

“The Love and Adventures of Kuroki Taro” is a weird film, even by Atg standards. It begins by showing Kuroki Taro and two other stuntmen in their line of work, even stating that “in this film, the stuntman is the star”. However, apart from these introductory scenes, the movie does not show any more behind the scenes footage in a film-about-film fashion, instead focusing on three different stories involving the titular character, and a side one, all of which are narrated by one of the initial characters, Juichi Ito. This last one is a rather personal one for Morisaki since he drew extensively from the war diary of his older brother Minato, who killed himself by harakiri the day after Japan's surrender.

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The first story involves Kuroki playing games with the police, essentially making them chase him by acting...

The great Miyazaki is back!! GKids has revealed a short teaser trailer for The Boy and the Heron, the new feature film from the iconic filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. This is his 12th feature film, and his latest since The Wind Rises in 2013. After opening in Japan in July, the film is premiering at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival this week with a big theatrical release planned this fall. "A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning. A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki." With an original score by Joe Hisaishi. Described as a "big fantastical film", it follows a boy who discovers an abandoned tower in his new town and enters a fantastical world with a talking grey heron.

Studio Ghibli has pulled back the curtain on Hayao Miyazaki’s animated fantasy epic “The Boy and the Heron,” the director’s first feature since his 2013 drama “The Wind Rises.” The movie will get a U.S. theatrical release on Dec. 8.

After playing in Japan, the film is now set to open the Toronto International Film Festival — the first animated or Japanese film to do so. It will also screen at the New York Film Festival. “The Boy and the Heron’s” release in Japan came with conspicuously little promotional material, an effort to maintain an air of secrecy around the enigmatic film. The only image of the movie before its Japanese release was of a mysterious heron, and the new trailer marks the first official footage released publicly to audiences.

The film has grossed $52.5 million to date in Japan, eight weeks into its theatrical run. That makes it Studio...

Following its official premiere in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, How Do You Live?, has revealed not only its official cast and staff but confirmation of an English release with a new title. While 2013’s The Wind Rises was marketed as Miyazaki’s final film, in 2016, it was announced that Miyazaki had begun working on a new film which would now serve as his last film, How Do You Live? What’s especially interesting is that according to Anime News Network, Studio Ghibli has deliberately decided to release it without any marketing, so people don’t feel spoiled before even seeing it, with not even the basic story being made public at any point.

All of that has changed following How Do You Live?’s premiere, however, and a lot of information about its production and international release has been revealed. Not only has the cast, staff, and actual story finally been revealed,...

In his 2005 book “Save the Cat!”, the renowned tutor and screenwriter Blake Snyder argues that one tool to make a successful screenplay is to effectively utilize either “save the cat” or “kick the dog” trope in the first five minutes of the film, i.e. make a character either save a cat or kick a dog, in order to give us a clear signal of his intentions if he’s good or evil.

In Takashi Miike’s fabulous “Gozu”, the maniacal yakuza Ozaki doesn’t just kick the dog. He thrashes the living hell out of it, and finishes his beating with swinging it round and round on the leash and smashing it into the restaurant front window in bloody bits at the five-minute mark exactly.

After Ozaki’s (Shô Aikawa) violent antics have become a liability, the boss (Miike mainstay Renji Ishibashi) orders his minion Minami...