There are times when more than one of us gets a little out of hand and the snowball keeps rolling and rolling and ends up becoming gigantic. And well, there are the small tricks and the level tricks of having worked with Hayao Miyazaki in his latest film, ‘The Boy and the Heron’.
We are leaving with the entire team
This has been the case of the Colombian Geraldine Fernández Ruiz, who invented a career as an entertainer. Fernández invented a fictitious life as an illustrator, which included several master’s degrees at the University of Tokyo (in bachelor’s degrees and subjects that do not exist at the university) and having worked for Studio Ghibli.
She was even interviewed by Latin American newspapers after ‘The Boy and the Heron’ won the Golden Globe a few days ago… and obviously as she attracted more attention, the story became more bizarre until everything has ended up being uncovered.
In a meeting with illustrators, Fernández talked about what it is like to work at Ghibli and what type of work he did in the film. And unless you know something about illustration or art, the lies were nowhere to be found.since Fernández claimed that he worked with “colors, watercolors, tempera paints, even acrylics (…) and even pastel chalks” for the same scene, mixing all kinds of techniques in the same scene.
“Every time I sent it was the layer of the sheet and a layer of paper on top or something so it wouldn’t get stained,” Fernández explained about how he (supposedly) sent the frames one by one by mail to Japan.
Fernández also claimed to have spoken on Google Meet with Hayao Miyazaki on three occasions, who referred to her as “the Colombian”: when she signed the contract at the start of production in 2019, when it was 50% complete in 2021 and at the end of the film. .
It must be pointed out that It is estimated that production of ‘The Boy and the Heron’ began in 2016, and it has been seven years of development until its premiere in July 2023. And although more and more Japanese studios have opened up to working with Westerners, teleworking for now is not as normalized as in other animation industries… So having a person working from Colombia would be a tremendously irregular case, especially for Studio Ghibli.
Fernández also assured that She alone had illustrated up to two million frames for ‘The Boy and the Heron’‘, and that specifically he drew “25,000 frames” for a specific scene. Depending on the type of animation, this would amount to about 37 minutes of film… almost a third of the total length.
In an interview with YouTuber Pablo González, he also claimed to have taken charge of the first fifteen minutes of ‘The Boy and the Heron’. “I did that whole scene. I mean, literally, the Colombian opened the movie.”
“After almost illustrating more than fifty thousand, twenty thousand… two million frames, your hand looks like this,” said Fernández about the amount of work he did for Ghibli.
During the time in which Fernández says he worked for Ghibli, He also worked for a company specialized in tempered glass called Tecnoglass. Furthermore, at no time does she appear in the credits of ‘The Boy and the Heron’ or in any other anime production, so Geraldine Fernández Ruiz does not seem to have any type of history as an animator.
Since this matter has been exploited on the networks, Fernández has erased all traces of himself on the internet and in more recent interviews. He is admitting to having “exaggerated” his work on the film and that he only made about two hundred frames.. According to what she tells El País, she admits that she worked on ‘The Boy and the Heron’ but that she never sought recognition, but that it was a friend of hers who leaked her participation to some journalists. Fernández has apologized after the controversy and assures that “if she could rewind back in time, she would handle the situation differently.”
But of course, the videos are there and internet is eternal. Fernández assures that after studying at the University of Tokyo doing a master’s degree in illustration, he was offered to work as a freelancer for Studio Ghibli, and that he has already contacted the studio to obtain a certificate to prove his participation in the film. For now he has not taught itbut let’s hope the ball doesn’t continue to get bigger.
