As the decade kicked off, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the anime box office was Hayao Miyazaki. Since the 1990s, every film by the director had been a surefire hit: His 2001 feature, ¡°Spirited Away,¡± is still the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan. But a few years into the 2010s came a shock to the big-screen anime world: Following the release of ¡°The Wind Rises¡± in 2013, Miyazaki announced his retirement, and soon thereafter his studio, Ghibli, laid off the majority of its staff, becoming little more than a clearing house for merchandising rights.
The exit of Miyazaki and Ghibli from the animation scene left a void which other studios scrambled to fill.
¡°Nothing else has really made as much of an impact,¡± says Renato Rivera Rusca, an animation producer and lecturer at Meiji University. ¡°In recent years, we¡¯ve seen a lot of theatrical anime coming up in general release and getting more attention. You could¡¯ve made the same movies, but I don¡¯t think they would have been as successful.¡±
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