Academy Museum Sets Hayao Miyazaki Retrospective as Inaugural Exhibition

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has announced its inaugural temporary exhibition will be a retrospective honoring Academy Award-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki.

The presentation will be on display in the museum’s Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, and will debut when the museum opens to the public on April 30, 2021. The temporary exhibition, celebrating the legendary animator’s six-decade career, will be the first North American museum retrospective of his work.

“We could not be more excited to launch our new institution with the most comprehensive presentation of Hayao’s Miyazaki’s work to date,” Academy Museum director Bill Kramer said in a statement. “Honoring the masterful career of this international artist is a fitting way to open our doors, signifying the global scope of the Academy Museum.”

The exhibition features more than 300 objects and will explore each of Miyazaki’s 11 animated feature films, including “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Castle in the Sky,” “Ponyo” and “Spirited Away.” The experience will be divided into seven sections, each evoking a different theme from Miyazaki’s work. The exhibition is curated by Academy Museum Exhibitions curator Jessica Niebel and assistant curator J. Raúl Guzmán and organized in collaboration with Studio Ghibli, which Miyazaki co-founded in 1985.

“Hayao Miyazaki has a singular ability to capture how we perceive life, with all its ambiguities and complexities,” Niebel said. “It has been a privilege to collaborate with Studio Ghibli in creating an exhibition that will appeal to the most avid Miyazaki fan and those not yet familiar with his work.”

This is also not the first time Miyazaki has been celebrated by the Academy. In addition to his Oscar win for best animated feature in 2003 for “Spirited Away,” the legendary animator was awarded an honorary Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2014.

“It is an immense honor that Hayao Miyazaki is the inaugural temporary exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Miyazaki’s genius is his power of remembering what he sees. He opens drawers in his head to pull out these visual memories to create characters, landscapes and structures that are busting with originality,” producer and Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suziki said. “It is our hope that visitors will be able to experience the entire scope of Hayao Miyazaki’s creative process through this exhibition. I am deeply grateful to all those who have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition.”

Accompanying the exhibition is a 256- page catalogue that features production materials from Miyazaki’s early television work through his feature films, offering insight into the filmmaker’s legendary animation techniques. The catalogue will be available when the exhibition debuts in April 2021. The museum’s theaters will also host film screenings of Miyazaki’s work in both English and Japanese and exclusive merchandise created with Studio Ghibli will be available exclusively at the museum store.