Ani-May-Tion: The Boy and the Heron (Dir Hayao Miyazaki, 2h4m, 2023)

Forty-one years ago this June, a small Japanese studio, named for a Italian airplane, itself nicknamed for a Libyan Arabic hot desert wind, set out to start a whirlwind through anime. What Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata, with Toshio Suzuki in tow did was change animation forever. To even try and sum up the decades-long reign of the legendary Studio Ghibli into superlatives, into lists of awards, is to know animation as art at its apex. Reader, if you've never been lucky enough to see any of their films to date, put the phone/laptop/device down and go watch just one, now - but for the last decade, the imminent end of Studio Ghibli, with Miyazaki not having directed a film since 2013, and with Takahata's death in 2015, has generated a book's worth of thinkpieces.

Hayao Miyazaki, of course, treats retirement as a minor setback - Ghibli fans worldwide were edified (and in some cases, unsurprised) to discover that even this most recent feature wouldn't be his last, as the director has to date retired and then promptly un-retired at least half a dozen times - thus, without fanfare, into the world steps his latest and most personal tale, The Boy and the Heron, a worthy addition to the Studio Ghibli canon, as the veteran director mixes Second World War Japan and magical realism to tell a coming of age tale, loosely adapting the Genzaburō Yoshino's 1937 novel How Do You Live? whilst drawing on elements of Miyazaki's own youth. 

Beginning with some of the starkest sequences in a Ghibli film, in which the young Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki/Luca Padovan) awakes during the firebombing of Tokyo, and sees the destruction of the hospital, and the death of his mother, Hisako, a patient.Mahito and his father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura/Christian Bale, both returning to working with Ghibli alongside a number of voice actors) retreat to the countryside, where Mahito's father plans to marry Hisako's sister, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura/Gemma Chan). Here, the relationship between child and step-mother is frosty, Shoichi often distracted by his work on the Japanese war effort, that, at one point sees plane canopies brought into the house for storage. Mahito is slow to warm to her, slow to settle at school, and, following a brutal sequence of self-harm that may be one of the most shocking moments of any Ghibli film, that later weighs heavily on the boy's conscience, withdraws from school to recover.

From here, following the appearance of the titular heron, who draws Mahito towards a mysterious tower, and can suddenly speak, voice duties shared between Japanese actor and singer, Masaki Suda, and a barely recognisable Robert Patterson, whose performance is completely scene-stealing, switching between a harsh croak that calls to mind Brando in Apocalypse Now crossed with Andy Serkis's Gollum, and a surprisingly smooth seductive voice, so the film slowly evolves into more Ghibli-esque fare. Saying that sounds like an anti-climax but here, for the first time in a decade, Hayao Miyazaki's visual imagination is on full display, as Mahito is drawn by the disappearance of Natsuko and the entrapment of himself and one of the house's elderly housekeepers, Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki/ a barely recognisable Florence Pugh) in the heron's world. 

What follows is a typically Ghibli-esque adventure, as Mahito must find, despite his misgivings, his mother-to-be, as well as contending with the forces of light and darkness that inhabit this world. Some of the visuals are as arresting as Ghibli has ever been under Miyazaki's stewardship. No wonder it took fifty animators seven years, with the film now the most expensive ever made in Japanese history, to put it together, but if this is to be Miyazaki's last feature, then he leaves us with a visual feast. These range from a great ghostly fleet that haunt the film's background to an entire tower under the control of murderous parakeets, commanded by their brash king (Jun Kunimura/Dave Bautista) to the Heron himself, who crosses back and forth between beautiful, frightening, grotesque, and comic, whilst the typical Ghibli detail is there in the lived in spaces of Japan and beyond. This is to say nothing of the scene-stealing, adorable, heavily merchandised, and slightly unsettling Warawara whose existence underpins the film's main message.

 For it is a message that rarely appears in the worlds of Ghibli, except from the late Takahata. Things are ending. Life is short. Death haunts The Boy and the Heron, both overtly - the world that Mahito finds himself in is not only a world of death, if the ghostly figures, the pelicans that feast upon the Warawara, and the visual allusions to the Arnold Böcklin painting, "Isle of the Dead" didn't give it away, but a world itself dying, its existence increasingly heavily relying on the aged figure of Mahito's long-disappeared Granduncle (Shōhei Hino/Mark Hamill). Mortality is ever-present in this film, from our protagonist's mother to the world he finds himself in, and all of this reflects Hayao Miyazaki in 2023, a man now in his eighties, considering his legacy, defining The Boy and the Heron, made for his grandson, as "Grandpa is moving on to the next world, but he's leaving behind, this film", but where the veteran animator and director still finds himself asking, and attempting to answer "How do You Live."

What The Boy and the Heron is at its centre is a film about Hayao Miyazaki himself. This is not merely the avatar of his younger self that Mahito represents, with so much of the director's childhood, from the illness of his mother, to his father working as a pre-WWII aeroplane manufacturer incorporated into the film, such that this may be the most autobiographical thing the director ever makes, but the older man, the wizened figure repeatedly creating, piling towers to keep this world alive, just as Hayao Miyazaki returns, even after the release of The Boy and the Heron, to create another and another world. No doubt, as was reported at the start of 2026, the director was back at work on another feature.

So, The Boy and the Heron is not a definitive end to Miyazaki's career, but it is perhaps to date his most definitive comment on handing the creative baton to the next generation; if it is to be Miyazaki's final feature, then what an ending, anime's great maestro crafting one final film in which he meditates on his own past and mortality, yet continues to create

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation) 

The Boy and the Heron is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Elysian, and streaming from Netflix

Next week we're on holiday, but will return in June to begin a four month cinematic odyssey across European Cinema, beginning with "A journey into the heart of Europa" in the company of Lars von Trier.