The Boy and the Heron

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The Movie in 3 Sentences

• 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.
• 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. So loved the visuals, even though I think it added to more confusion understanding the plot.
• Walking out of the theater, I couldn’t help but wonder: how comfortable was Miyazaki portraying imperial Japan so beautifully? The movie is set during wartime Japan, and Mahito’s family is comfortably connected to the war economy, yet the story focuses much more on Mahito’s grief than on Japan’s aggression during World War II. The mysterious object that falls from the sky is described as a meteorite, and the Great-Uncle builds his tower around it. Inside, that stone becomes the foundation of the alternate world he is trying to preserve. Mahito ultimately refuses that inheritance and chooses the imperfect real world, knowing it contains violence and suffering. That makes the ending feel potentially much more political: perhaps Miyazaki is saying to the generations after his own, you do not have to preserve the world we built simply because we built it.
• That said, it did feel to me like Miyazaki’s creative arc has been trending downward. I still admire the ambition, but I hope another grandmaster of animation emerges in the future.