In what must be considered one of the saddest days for cinema since the inception of the medium, the home of Japanese anime, Studio Ghibli, announced today that it is to close. With the retirement of its most famous artist, Miyazaki Hayao, and the recent domestic disappointment of Takahata Isao's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya at the box office, the studio has taken a slight hit in the recent year. Among the most consistently-excellent production houses in world cinema, if not the most, Ghibli opened its final film as a working house, Yonebayashi Hiromasa's When Marnie Was There in Japan on the 10th of July, and will end its run with Oscar-winner Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle, a French feature, co-written by Lady Chatterley's Pascale Ferran, on which it will serve as a co-production company. The closure of the studio will be remembered as among the most heartbreaking moments in film history. Its exceptionally-talented artists have contributed unfathomable amounts of wonder and beauty not only to animation cinema but to the art form as a whole since its first feature, Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Thanks, Studio Ghibli. We'll never forget all the dreams you made real, the flights of fancy you made fantastically true, and we'll never tire of your incomparable back catalogue.
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