The Boy and the Heron (2023) Review: Miyazaki Looks Inward

Is The Boy and the Heron worth watching?

Yes, with reservations. The Boy and the Heron is a visually magnificent and often moving film from Hayao Miyazaki, but it is also his most private and puzzling, and it asks more patience than it always repays. The first hour, a quiet study of grief in wartime Japan, is as strong as anything in his later work. Once the story crosses into its fantasy world, it becomes a procession of wondrous images whose logic is harder to hold, and some viewers will admire it more than they feel it.

What is The Boy and the Heron about?

During the Second World War, Mahito, a boy still reeling from his mother’s death in a Tokyo fire, moves with his father to a large country estate. Waiting there is Natsuko, his new stepmother, who is also his late mother’s sister and looks strikingly like her. Mahito is withdrawn and angry, the estate’s elderly housekeepers watch him closely, and something is wrong with the grounds: a grey heron keeps appearing, taunting him, and eventually speaking, calling him the “long-awaited one” and luring him toward an abandoned tower on the property.

The Boy and the Heron is a Studio Ghibli film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is a Japanese production in Japanese, running 124 minutes, with Soma Santoki voicing Mahito, Masaki Suda as the heron and Takuya Kimura as Mahito’s father. Its Japanese title borrows from Genzaburō Yoshino’s novel How Do You Live?, and it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

An opening hour of rare emotional precision

The film begins with one of the most frightening sequences Miyazaki has animated: a city on fire at night, drawn in smeared, blurred motion that captures panic from a child’s point of view. From there the tone settles into something quieter and heavier. Mahito does not cry or explain himself; he watches, he withholds, and at one point he does something to himself that reveals how much anger he is carrying. It is an unusually unsentimental portrait of a grieving child, and it gives the fantasy that follows real stakes.

The estate is animated with Ghibli’s familiar care, from the weight of rain on leaves to the clutter of a sickroom, and Joe Hisaishi’s spare piano score keeps the emotion restrained. The heron itself is a brilliant creation: elegant from a distance, grotesque up close, and genuinely unnerving before it becomes comic.

A fantasy world that follows its own rules

When Mahito crosses into the otherworld, the film opens up into a series of set pieces that only Miyazaki could imagine: seas and islands, swarms of creatures both adorable and threatening, an entire society with its own hierarchy and appetites. Individually, many of these scenes are breathtaking. The colours are rich, the movement is dense with detail, and the design of the creatures is as inventive as anything in his filmography.

What the second half lacks is the clear through-line that made films like Spirited Away so easy to follow. Characters appear with little introduction, the rules of the world shift from scene to scene, and the film’s symbolism, about inheritance, creation and what one generation leaves the next, is often more felt than explained. Viewers who enjoy interpreting will find much to chew on. Those who want a story that resolves its own mysteries may find the final stretch bewildering.

Miyazaki’s most personal film

Part of what makes The Boy and the Heron fascinating is how directly it seems to draw on its maker’s life and career. It is a film by an artist in his eighties, looking back on a wartime childhood and on the question of what his work will mean after him. That gives even its most confusing passages a sincerity that is hard to dismiss, and it rewards a second viewing more than most.

Who should watch The Boy and the Heron?

It is essential for Miyazaki devotees and a strong choice for adult fans of animation who enjoy ambiguity. It is less suitable as a first Ghibli film, and younger children may find the opening fire, moments of bloody injury and several frightening creatures disturbing. At a little over two hours, it is best watched with full attention; the English dub is well cast, but the Japanese original with subtitles is worth choosing.

If you want to go further into Miyazaki’s world:

• Spirited Away, another story of a child lost in a spirit world, with a far clearer shape.
• My Neighbor Totoro, a gentler tale of children moving to the countryside while their mother is ill.
• Howl’s Moving Castle, which also sets fantasy against a backdrop of war.

The verdict

The Boy and the Heron is a beautiful, strange and sometimes frustrating film, anchored by a powerful study of grief and carried by animation of extraordinary richness. Its looser second half keeps it short of Miyazaki’s masterpieces, but it remains a moving, personal work from a great filmmaker.

Rating: 3.5/5