'The Boy and the Heron' is iconic filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's first new animated fantasy adventure in a decade. It's also this year's Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature Film. The question, though, is whether it's a genuine masterpiece, or whether critics and fans are forever dazzled by Studio Ghibli's creative legacy.

It has been over a decade now since a Studio Ghibli film spearheaded by iconic Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki was released, with the last being 2013's The Wind Rises. The latest offering, The Boy and the Heron, delivers exactly what fans could want: sumptuous hand-drawn visuals, a mix of the whimsical and the weird, and a final, lingering feeling of hope.

The Boy and the Heron won this year's Academy Award for Animated Feature Film, signalling its quality, but it's hard to deny that it's a distinct throwback experience. It represents the past of animation, not the future, and with closer inspection, it demonstrates some fundamental structural flaws.

Coming across as Pan's Labyrinth by way of Alice in Wonderland, with a dash of Piranesi, The Boy and the Heron liberally samples from Miyazaki's own biography, with adolescent Mahito Maki relocating from Tokyo to the family's country estate during World War 2. Along with that adjustment, Mahito is struggling to accept his aunt Natsuko as his new mother, despite the fact she married his widowed father and is already pregnant. Matters come to a head when Natsuko disappears, and evidence points to the ruins of an old tower associated with strange...