TL;DR – A heartbreaking and devastating exploration of grief set to a beautiful backdrop and wacky characters.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid to see this film.

The Boy and the Heron Review –

When you look at the great animation studios of history, one name does tend to stand out, so much so that we wrote a whole article about The Beauty of Ghibli. For a long time, we thought that there would be no more films because creator Hayao Miyazaki had retired. However, it seems like Miyazaki-san does not like to take it easy, and it means that we get another of his movies, and who am I to disagree?

So to set the scene, Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki/ Luca Padovan) is a young boy during WW2 who is haunted by the day he watched as the hospital with his mother inside burned to the ground. He has not really had a chance to process this when his father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura/ Christian Bale) marries his late wife’s younger sister Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura/ Gemma Chan) and moves into her estate in the countryside, where a Grey Heron (Masaki Suda/ Robert Pattinson) pays a particular notice to the new arrival.  

It should go without saying, but it is probably best that I confirm here that this is a stunningly beautiful film. When we arrived in the countryside and saw the surroundings, it was so beautiful that it was an emotional experience for me. Add to this, we see more fluid movement in the opening as Mahito desperately and futilely tries to run to the hospital as embers and flames fly around. I liked that the film could have quite realistic representations of people situated with some wild characters, and it still works as a whole. From the music perspective, Joe Hisaishi is one of the best, and there is no change here. I liked some of the more restrained parts of the score when we just got a piano and oboe setting the mood.

The narrative is an interesting one in that it has an obvious surface story that is interposed with a deep structure underneath. On the surface, he is a boy desperately processing his grief in a society racked by a war and a father who has created a distance. In that absence, he takes matters into his own messy hands. Then there are the structures underneath in this slightly magical world that exists just under the real world. It would be a surprising Ghibli film that didn’t have a magical world hidden in the real. Also, the magical world can be pretty terrifying at times.   

 I don’t want to get more into the magical side of things because we would enter spoiler territory, but I do want to say that it gets deep with layers of history, mythology, and trauma. All while the echoes of the classical Japanese children’s novel How Do You Live? (君たちはどう生きるか) rumbles through the story. It is very heartfelt at times, but it was also a narratively dense section of the film that took some time to parse. Indeed, it has been a day since I watched the movie, and I am still parsing everything that happened.

The only option for me to watch the film near me was with the English cast, which usually would be a deal breaker. However, historically, Ghibli has actually had robust translations, and from what I can tell, they have done so again here. I think my favourite member of the cast was Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki/Florence Pugh), who has some of the best lines in the film. She is also the grounding that the film needs when you also have a Parakeet King (Jun Kunimura/ Dave Bautista) to contend with.

In the end, do we recommend The Boy and the Heron? Yes, I would. It is a hard film to watch at times, but you can also feel the waves of emotions as they parse through the narrative. I am not sure I will get the entire film on the first watch-through, but that just means I need to watch it again. If you liked The Boy and the Heron, we would recommend watching Luca.         

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you watched The Boy and the Heron?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day. 


Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of The Boy and the Heron
Directed by – Hayao Miyazaki
Written by – Hayao Miyazaki
Music by – Joe Hisaishi
Cinematography by – Atsushi Okui
Edited by – Takeshi Seyama
Production/Distribution Companies – Studio Ghibli, Toho, Crunchyroll & Sony
English Cast – Luca Padovan, Robert Pattinson, Karen Fukuhara, Gemma Chan, Christian Bale, Mark Hamill, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe, Dave Bautista, Mamoudou Athie, Tony Revolori & Dan Stevens  
Japanese Cast – Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon, Yoshino Kimura, Takuya Kimura, Shōhei Hino, Ko Shibasaki, Kaoru Kobayashi, Jun Kunimura, Keiko Takeshita, Jun Fubuki, Sawako Agawa, Shinobu Otake & Karen Takizawa
Rating – Australia: PG; Canada: PG; Germany: na; New Zealand: na; United Kingdom: 12a; United States: PG-13