Films·Jun 20, 2023

The Boy and the Heron

2023 film by Hayao Miyazaki.

Metadata

Director	Hayao Miyazaki
Year	2023
Writer	Hayao Miyazaki
Stars	Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon

Summary: The Boy and the Heron follows Mahito, a boy grieving his mother’s death during wartime, as he moves to the countryside and encounters a strange talking heron. The heron leads him into a surreal world filled with spirits, birds, towers, and impossible rules. What begins as a fairy-tale adventure slowly becomes a story about grief, inheritance, and whether Mahito can choose life after loss.
Overall theme: The movie is about mourning, imagination, and the burden of building a world after destruction. Miyazaki uses the fantasy realm as a space where Mahito confronts death, anger, family history, and the temptation to escape reality. Its deepest idea is that growing up means accepting a broken world without giving up the responsibility to live honestly inside it.
Cinematography style: The animation is lush, fluid, and dreamlike, shifting between quiet natural beauty and strange, unsettling fantasy. The countryside scenes feel soft and grounded, while the other world is full of uncanny creatures, floating architecture, and sudden bursts of chaos. Visually, it has the handmade richness of late Miyazaki: delicate everyday gestures, sweeping movement, and images that feel symbolic before they feel explainable.