The Boy and the Heron (12A)

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki

English Voice Cast: Luca Padovan, Robert Pattinson, Karen Fukuhara, Gemma Chan, Christian Bale, Mark Hamill, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe, Dave Bautista

Japanese Voice Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon, Yohino Kimura, Takuya Kimura, Shohei Hino, Ko Shibasaki, Kaoru Kobayashi, Jun Kunimura

Visionary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki returns after ten years of retirement to direct this beautifully animated wartime fairytale.

With 2023 coming to a close, I can now look back on what has proven to be a great year for animated movies. With major cinematic releases including: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Elemental and the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feature doing well at the box office, along with surprise streaming hits like Nimona, it is exciting to see how animation continues to develop as another year comes to a close.

‘The Boy and the Heron‘, the last major animated release of 2023, has been one of my most anticipated films ever since it went into production way back in 2016. The highly anticipated anime is the latest film by the Japanese animation giant, Studio Ghibli, a studio which has consistently churned out animated classics for forty years. Ever since I was first introduced to the movies of Ghibli, with the release of the Academy Award winning Spirited Away in 2001, I have been a lifelong admirer. The studio’s level of craft and imagination has seen them receive international acclaim and no one is more responsible for their huge success than visionary Japanese filmmaker, Hayao Miyazaki. Whilst there have been several highly regarded artists and directors working with Ghibli over the years, it is the works of Miyazaki that have introduced audiences from all over the world to Ghibli.

After the release of his heart-breaking The Wind Rises in 2013, Miyazaki announced his retirement, leaving Ghibli without their talisman. After subsequent string of disappointing releases, including the universally panned Earwig and the Witch, the studio appeared to be in decline. Much to their relief, in 2016 Miyazaki announced he would be coming out of retirement to make a deeply personal film based on the novel ‘How Do You Live?’, a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino, which Miyazaki read in his childhood. After initially aiming to release the film to coincide with 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, the film was delayed to allow Miyazaki to rewrite the film for his grandson. Finally in 2023, the film released in Japan and eventually worldwide and I can safely say despite his age, the 82 year old Miyazaki, still is a true master of his craft.

The film, now titled, ‘The Boy and the Heron‘ tells the story of the titular boy, Mahito (Soma Santoki/Luca Padovan) who loses his mother in a hospital fire during the Pacific War. Mahito and his father, Shocihi (Takuya Kimura/Christian Bale) relocate to their rural estate with Shoichi’s late wife’s sister, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura/Gemma Chan). The estate is attended by several old maids and a still grieving Mahito encounters a peculiar grey heron (Masaki Suda/Robert Pattinson) which leads him to the ruins of a mysterious tower on the grounds of the estate.

After seeing Natsuko wandering towards the tower, Mahito and one of the maids, Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki/Florence Pugh), follow in pursuit, only to be trapped in the tower themselves. The heron, with promises of finding Mahito’s dead mother, leads the pair through the tower and into an oceanic world ruled by Mahito’s granduncle (Shohei Hino/Mark Hamill), under the watchful eye of the treacherous Parakeet King (Jun Kunimura/Dave Bautista) and his army of carnivorous parakeets. Mahito must descend deeper into this fantastical world in search of the pregnant Natsuko and his potentially still living mother.

With plenty of sentiment and a striking visual style, Miyazaki’s return to cinema is a beautiful and melancholic fairytale. Reverting back to the hand drawn animation style that made Ghibli a household name, Miyazaki crafts a mysterious and magical world packed with fascinating creatures and folklore. Every individual frame of the film’s two hour runtime could be sold as a work of art, from the chaotic scenes of a burning Tokyo to the serene backdrops of the Japanese countryside, the Japanese animation studio once again prove that even in a world with CGI and computer animation, they can never truly capture sense of awe of hand drawn imagery.

Much like Miyazaki’s other works, ‘The Boy and the Heron‘ is not afraid to take its time, allowing its audience to fully immerse into the world that is being built in front of them. Alongside the latest Spider-Verse entry, ‘The Boy and the Heron’ is one of my favourite animated films of an impressive year for the medium, and the two films could not be any more different. Spider-Verse’s mix of 2D and 3D animation results in the film zooming along at a frenetic pace, leaving the viewer with very little time for respite. ‘The Boy and the Heron‘ however saunters along thanks to Miyazaki’s maturity as a filmmaker combined with Joe Hisaishi‘s beautifully sombre score, that gently weaves the scenes film’s emotional core with the more fantastical elements.

It is a true testament to Ghibli and Miyazaki, that they can still continue to produce works to this standard after so many years, and whilst it does not quite hit the atmospheric heights of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, ‘The Boy and the Heron’ will still go down as one of the studio’s best and thanks to a talented Japanese and English voice cast, is an accessible and imaginative film for adults and children alike.

The Boy and the Heron is now showing in UK Cinemas