The Boy and the Heron: A Snubbed Masterpiece

The Snub at Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2024

With the nominees for Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2024 out, Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron failed to make the nominations. The film was released on July 14, 2023, in Japan. Nevertheless, it got snubbed for the nominations despite winning a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Film.

Crunchyroll Anime Awards is an annual award program conducted to honor the artistry and craft of Japanese animation, all while appreciating the work done by creators, animators, musicians, and performers. Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2024 ceremony is planned to take place on March 2, 2024.

On Wednesday, January 17, 2024, Crunchyroll announced its nominees for the 2024 Anime Awards categories, one of which was the Best Film award. The nominees for the Best Film award were as follows:

- Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King - BLUE GIANT - Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- - PSYCHO-PASS: Providence - Suzume - THE FIRST SLAM DUNK

Nominees for the Best Film for 2024 Anime Awards (Image via Crunchyroll)

Evidently, Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron did not make the cut and missed out on being one of the nominees despite winning a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Film. Additionally, the film did not even get nominated for any other categories and was completely left out of contention for any awards.

The Exclusion Criteria

While fans would think that Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2024 unfairly left out the anime film from being one of the nominees, the only reason it missed out is because of the anime awards' voting process.

As an anime film, The Boy and the Heron could only get nominated for a possible four awards, namely Best Film, Best Anime Song, Best Score, and Best VA Performance. Unfortunately, the anime film did not qualify for any of the criteria because it was not released outside Japan before September 2023.

As per the voting process, only anime that had initialized its legal distribution outside Japan before September 2023 could qualify for the awards. Considering that, The Boy and the Heron's first international legal distribution was in Taiwan on October 6, 2023, it failed to qualify for Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2024.

Hope for the Future

That said, given the strange circumstance, there is a possibility that Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron will qualify as one of the nominees for the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards.