The nominations won’t be announced until Jan. 15, but it’s safe to say that the greatest filmmaker associated with the 2015 Academy Awards has already received his Oscar, delivered a modest but revealing acceptance speech and flown home to Japan and, perhaps, retirement.

Hayao Miyazaki was given an honorary Oscar on Nov. 8 at the Governors Awards ceremony, one that he can put on the shelf next to the statuette he won in 2003 when his masterpiece, “Spirited Away,” was named best animated feature. He got off a sly one-liner about his wife and paid an impish tribute to the Hollywood veteran Maureen O’Hara, a fellow Governors Award honoree along with Harry Belafonte and the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

Between those two humorous notes, he was serious — honest, elegiac, rueful — on the subjects of animation and his country’s history, which gave his brief remarks something in common with his films. “I think I’ve been lucky because I’ve been able to participate in the last era when we can make films with paper, pencils and film,” he said through a translator. “Another fact of luck is that my country has not been at war for the 50 years that I have been making films. Of course, we’ve profited from wars, but we’re very fortunate that we have not had to go to war ourselves.”

Many things contribute to the enchantment of the 11 animated feature films Mr. Miyazaki has made, beginning with “The Castle of Cagliostro” in 1979. Their sheer pictorial beauty, in the lush, painterly style he developed during years of apprenticeship as a hands-on animator for film and television and as a comic book, or manga, artist. Their swooping, beautifully constructed action sequences, breathless scenes of racing, leaping and, always, flight — in vintage airplanes, on broomsticks or mounted atop mysterious beasts. And, of course, the beasts, spirits, demons and familiars themselves, a seemingly inexhaustible menagerie of companions and impediments for his plucky young heroes (who are most often heroines).