The Boy and the Heron (2023)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Screenwriter: Hayao Miyazaki
Starring: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon, Yoshino Kimura, Takuya Kimura, Shōhei Hino, Ko Shibasaki, Kaoru Kobayashi, Jun Kunimura
When Hayao Miyazaki returned with The Boy and the Heron, it felt like the work of an artist who has outlived expectations and kept inventing. After earlier films that were frequently reported as his farewell, Miyazaki and the animators at Studio Ghibli continued to create in near secrecy, and this film emerges as another major statement from a studio known for hand-drawn craft. This movie ranks among the studio’s most ambitious recent efforts: both intimate in feeling and ambitious in its surreal imagery.
The narrative follows Mahito, a young boy evacuated from wartime Tokyo to his stepmother Natsuko’s countryside home alongside his father, a factory owner. The ordinary domestic upheaval soon gives way to strange encounters: a talking grey heron with unnerving behavior pursues Mahito, and events escalate until he is drawn into a parallel, dreamlike realm. From there the story becomes a series of encounters and trials that test his grief, courage, and imagination.
Miyazaki’s ability to mix childlike wonder with darker, mature themes is on full display. The film does not shy away from trauma—Mahito struggles with loss, displacement and the aftermath of wartime violence. Yet Miyazaki translates these heavy emotions into a fable-like journey that often wanders into the uncanny and the ecstatic. The director pairs visual invention with emotional honesty, so sequences that might otherwise read as mere spectacle instead feel bound to the boy’s interior life.
Visually, the film is unmistakably Ghibli: meticulous hand-drawn backgrounds, richly imagined creatures and a careful contrast between the lived-in reality of the countryside and the otherworldly places Mahito visits. At times the animation turns expressionistic, especially in moments depicting Tokyo ablaze—fire and figures blend and warp into nightmarish tableaux. Those sequences are intense and occasionally unsettling, giving the film one of the more visceral visual palettes among Miyazaki’s fantastical works.
The otherworld Mahito enters is deliberately ambiguous. It feels untethered to ordinary time and inhabited by people who might be ahead of or behind Mahito on their own life paths. That structure allows the film to explore memory, mourning and what it means to grow up under loss. The dream logic—part Lewis Carroll, part mythic fable—means the film frequently prioritizes mood, metaphor and emotional revelation over strict plot clarity.
Creatures and totems play a central role. Birds recur as symbols and agents of fate: some are benign, others manipulative or even hostile. Miyazaki repurposes folkloric associations—birds as omens, messengers, and liminal beings—to populate a world where the boundary between life and death is porous. The film also offers the familiar Ghibli balance of the grotesque and the lovable: many spirits and beings are simultaneously charming and unsettling, echoing earlier iconic creations such as soot sprites and forest spirits.
Structurally, the film takes its time. The second half expands into episodes that feel like embellished chapters of a children’s tale sustained for an adult sensibility. Strange mentors, magical lessons and surreal trials accumulate—Mahito follows his stepmother into an ancient library that opens onto another world; he learns rituals that transform wandering spirits; he confronts forces that threaten to impose a brutal order on life itself. The narrative’s crescendo arrives later than in conventional films, but this patient build allows emotional resonance to accumulate rather than relying on tidy exposition.
For parents and viewers sensitive to intensity, some sequences may be distressing: the film is candid about suffering and loss, and it uses visual terror to underline the stakes of the boy’s journey. At the same time, there are moments of fierce tenderness and wonder, and a pair of resourceful heroines help guide Mahito through danger with courage and compassion. The result is a film that is at once a meditation on grief, a celebration of imaginative survival, and a showcase for Miyazaki’s lifelong command of animated storytelling.
In sum, The Boy and the Heron feels like another late-career masterpiece from Hayao Miyazaki: dreamy, unsettling, richly drawn and emotionally intricate. It refuses to simplify the experience of growing up amid loss, preferring instead to render that process with mythic imagination. Whether or not the director makes another film, this one stands as a powerful, beautifully crafted work that deepens and complicates his already remarkable filmography.
Score: 23/24