The Boy and the Heron

• 1. Introduction

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  The Boy and the Heron, a 2023 fantasy film from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, reached Japanese theaters behind a single poster and nothing else. No trailer. No cast list. No plot summary. A decade earlier, Miyazaki had stood at a press conference in Tokyo and said, "I know I've said I would retire many times in the past. Many of you must think, 'Once again.' But this time I am quite serious." He did not stay retired. He came back to direct a film that producer Toshio Suzuki would later call the most expensive ever made in Japan. How does a director walk back a retirement he swore was final? Why would a studio spend that heavily and then hide the finished film from view? And what convinced audiences to fill cinemas for a movie they knew almost nothing about?

• 2. Seven Years in the Making

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  Work on a short film called Boro the Caterpillar, released in 2018, led Miyazaki to reverse his decision to retire. He began storyboarding a new feature in July 2016, a turn captured in the 2016 documentary Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki. A month later he presented a project proposal built partly around The Book of Lost Things, a children's novel by Irish author John Connolly. The studio described it as "a loose framework." A work by mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo, loved by Miyazaki as a child, inspired the tower at the center of the new story.

  Toshio Suzuki was initially resistant to producing the new film, but Miyazaki's commitment and storyboard work won him over. Suzuki announced the start of work in February 2017, and on the 19th of May 2017 the studio's official website posted a call for staff. At an event at Waseda University in October 2017, the studio revealed the film's Japanese title, Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka. The name was drawn from Genzaburō Yoshino's 1937 novel. Suzuki clarified that the novel itself had no connection to the story beyond lending its title. Miyazaki hoped to release the film around the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan. Suzuki said he was making it for his grandson, adding, "Grandpa is moving on to the next world, but he's leaving behind this film."

  Suzuki told the press in August 2018 that he expected the film to be finished by 2021 or 2022. By the end of October 2019 it was only 15 percent complete. In a December 2019 interview with NHK, Suzuki explained that Miyazaki's pace had slowed sharply. He once produced 10 minutes of animation a month; now he managed only 1 minute a month. Suzuki doubted talk that this would be Miyazaki's last film, arguing he would likely keep making them as long as he lived. Unlike his earlier work, Miyazaki left frame-by-frame oversight to animation director Takeshi Honda and concentrated on the storyboards himself.

  In February 2020, Studio Ghibli began licensing earlier films to streaming services such as Netflix to help fund production. Suzuki had to convince Miyazaki to agree, since the director did not use a computer or a smartphone and knew little about streaming. By May 2020, Suzuki told Entertainment Weekly that 60 animators had completed about 36 minutes of footage after three years of work. "We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we're drawing more frames," he said. He added that he hoped to finish within three more years.

  By December 2020, Suzuki said the production still had no deadline. He compared it to The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which had taken eight years to complete. He said COVID-19 restrictions had not halted work, and that half of the film's planned 125-minute runtime was done. Miyazaki had also wanted to adapt Diana Wynne Jones's novel Earwig and the Witch, but his son Goro directed that project instead. During Earwig's production, cinematographer Atsushi Okui suggested using Dolby Cinema technology, drawn to how it kept bright scenes sharp without crushing the dark areas.

  In an interview published in October 2021, Miyazaki said he was making the film because he had no answer to the question "how do you live?" A year later, in October 2022, Studio Ghibli's chairman said the film was nearing completion without giving a release date. That December, Takuya Kimura, who had voiced Howl in Howl's Moving Castle, hinted at his involvement in a social media post.

  All told, the production stretched across roughly seven years. About two and a half years went to pre-production, and close to five years to production itself. Through much of that time, the film's music was quietly taking shape under one of Miyazaki's longest-serving collaborators.

• 3. The Sound of Spinning Globe

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  Joe Hisaishi, who had scored Miyazaki's films for decades, composed and conducted the music for this one as well. The soundtrack, 37 songs in total, was released in Japan on the 9th of August 2023 by Tokuma Japan Communications. Kenshi Yonezu wrote and sang the film's theme, known internationally as "Spinning Globe."

  Yonezu's first visit to Studio Ghibli came in 2018, a meeting that grew into his work on the film. That collaboration was partly driven by his earlier song "Paprika," written for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Suzuki once watched Miyazaki singing along to Yonezu's music with children at Ghibli's own nursery school. Miyazaki approved the eventual theme song only after listening to a demo recording.

  Yonezu was shown storyboards and given details of the project before he began writing. He then spent five years shaping the song alongside Miyazaki and Suzuki. That five-year process unfolded almost entirely out of public view, a secrecy that would define everything else about how the film reached audiences.

• 4. The Business of Silence

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  On the 13th of December 2022, Toho announced only a release date for the film: the 14th of July 2023. Neither the cast nor the crew was disclosed alongside it. The decision came from Suzuki, who wanted to avoid giving away the film's content and believed audiences preferred a more enigmatic experience at the cinema.

  At a preview screening in late February 2023, a message from Miyazaki was read aloud after the credits: "Perhaps you didn't understand it. I myself don't understand it." Suzuki later said Miyazaki had voiced real concern about the film's limited publicity, but Suzuki himself remained confident it was the right call.

  It became the first Studio Ghibli or Miyazaki film released simultaneously on IMAX alongside formats such as Dolby Atmos, Dolby Cinema, and DTS:X. Overseas, the film was pre-sold with no confirmed release date attached. Goodfellas, formerly known as Wild Bunch International, handled sales. GKIDS acquired the North American rights, making it the widest release in the company's 15-year history.

  The first photographs from the film only surfaced on the 11th of August 2023, printed in theater pamphlets Ghibli distributed to Japanese moviegoers. Special previews followed on the 22nd of November, ahead of a United States theatrical release on the 8th of December 2023. Its international premiere came on the 7th of September 2023, at the Toronto International Film Festival. There, it became the first animated film to open that festival. It also screened at the 71st San Sebastián International Film Festival and the 2023 New York Film Festival. It appeared too at the 56th Sitges Film Festival and the 42nd Vancouver International Film Festival.

  Studio Ghibli handed promotional control for the American release to GKIDS. GKIDS took a different approach, including a teaser trailer released ahead of the Toronto premiere. Director Guillermo del Toro introduced the film at that gala. Studio Ghibli's vice president, Junichi Nishioka, said at the time that the studio did not consider the film Miyazaki's last. He noted that Miyazaki was developing new ideas and still coming into the office daily, a view Suzuki repeated in October 2023. An official guidebook followed later that month, with interviews, roundtable discussions, and storyboards.

  GKIDS managed casting for the English-language version alongside Studio Ghibli. The dub was directed by Michael Sinterniklaas at NYAV Post, with a script by Stephanie Sheh. The cast, unveiled on the 17th of October 2023, included Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, and Willem Dafoe. It also included Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson, and Florence Pugh. Pattinson spent several weeks perfecting a nasal growl to voice the Heron, then recorded all of his dialogue in just two days.

  Walt Disney Japan released the film on DVD, Blu-ray, and Ultra HD Blu-ray on the 3rd of July 2024. It was the first time a Studio Ghibli film reached 4K. GKIDS and Shout! Studios matched those formats in North America on the 9th of July. That followed a digital release on the 25th of June and preceded a streaming release on HBO Max on the 6th of September. Netflix picked it up outside the United States and Japan on the 7th of October 2024. None of this reached audiences before the original July premiere. Yet something about the film had already traveled, and it showed up at the box office.

• 5. A Director's Own Life

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  Mahito's father, in the story, owns an air munitions factory, just as Miyazaki's own father worked for a company that made fighter plane components. Both families evacuate to the countryside during wartime. The hospital fire that opens the film echoes Miyazaki's own loss of his mother. She was known for her strong opinions and is thought to have shaped several of his female characters. Mahito's bond with his mother mirrors Miyazaki's own attachment to his.

  Taichiro Yoshino, grandson of the novelist Genzaburō Yoshino, recalled that Miyazaki wanted Mahito to differ from his earlier, sunnier protagonists. In Miyazaki's words, "boys are actually less pure and swirling with all kinds of things." Fiction Horizon described Mahito as embodying resilience, vulnerability, and transformative growth. The BBC called the film "a coming-of-age tale in which a child must overcome his selfishness and learn to live for others."

  Nikkei Asia's Kaori Shoji identified the story's driving force as a longing for a mother's presence. She called it a "quest for worthiness" that recurs throughout Miyazaki's work. That emotion, she wrote, periodically gives way to detours into adventures with fantastical creatures. Shoji also pointed to Freudian undertones in the father's marriage to his late wife's sister. She noted "quasi-sexual" touches too, such as a scene in which Mahito is covered in frogs.

  Suzuki said Miyazaki wanted to build the film out of his own experiences and relationships when he first proposed it in 2016. That personal turn caught Suzuki off guard, given Miyazaki's usual avoidance of such material. The story draws on Miyazaki's real relationships with Isao Takahata, echoed in the character of the Granduncle, and with Suzuki himself, echoed in the Heron. It weaves in themes of destruction, reconstruction, and imagination. After Takahata died in 2018, the filmmakers revised the script, shifting focus away from the Granduncle and toward the bond between Mahito and the Heron.

  A review on RogerEbert.com called the finished film "the work of an artist reflecting on a career," one that ties old age back to childhood. IndieWire's Brian Welk argued it pulls together tones and styles from across Miyazaki's filmography. He saw it moving away from a traditional children's story and closer to the "violent" register of Princess Mononoke from 1997. That was a sharper turn than the "cuddly charm" of My Neighbor Totoro from 1988.

  The film carries the stated message of building "a world without conflict with your own hands." The Japan Times' Matt Schley read the Japanese title as posing children a moral choice. They could repeat the mistakes of the Pacific War's perpetrators, or "rise to the occasion and do better." Unlike Yoshino's original novel, written as moral guidance for adolescent boys, the film leaves its own answer to "how do you live?" deliberately open. According to Vox, it still stresses the Granduncle's demand that his descendants act urgently, since time is short.

  Unseen Japan argued the film pushes viewers to weigh their own place in a world scarred by violence. It also raises their obligations to future generations and their ties to those who came before. Vulture noted that despite all this weight, the film still makes room for scenes of bird droppings played for comic relief. None of that ambiguity showed up in the box office receipts, which told a far simpler story.

• 6. Numbers and Praise

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  In Japan, The Boy and the Heron opened bigger than any previous Studio Ghibli release, overtaking the 2004 debut of Howl's Moving Castle. It earned from 44 IMAX screens, setting a new three-day IMAX record. Within its first several days, 1.35 million tickets had already sold.

  By the 4th of September 2023, cumulative ticket sales had reached 5.1 million. On the 11th of September 2023 it became the 20th-highest-grossing anime film in Japanese history. It dropped out of the box office top 10 for the first time in its 13th weekend.

  Japan's cumulative gross climbed slowly after that. It grew from 8.44 billion yen on the 15th of October 2023 to 8.66 billion yen by the 24th of December 2023. By the 17th of March 2024, it reached 8.98 billion yen, making the film the sixth highest-grossing Japanese film of all time.

  Film journalist Hiroo Ōtaka described how surprised the industry was that the film succeeded despite its "minimalist promotion." Distribution representatives told him the strategy worried them, since it seemed to threaten both their livelihoods and the case for traditional advertising. Ōtaka credited two other forces. The silence itself sparked discussion on social media. Ghibli's older films, shown for a decade on the television program Friday Road Show, had also kept the studio in public view.

  Internationally, the film became the first original anime release to open at number one at the box office in both Canada and the United States. It was also Miyazaki's first film to do so. In China, it broke the single-day record for a foreign animated film.

  On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 91 out of 100 from 55 critic reviews, described as "universal acclaim." Audiences polled by CinemaScore graded the English dub an "A minus" on the A-plus to F scale. Early reactions inside Japan were mixed, with some viewers calling it dense and hard to follow, before acclaim built quickly.

  Eiga Channel called it one of Ghibli's finest films for both visuals and storytelling, while warning that newcomers might find its rapid scene changes confusing. Time Out Japan called it "a mature, complex masterpiece, weaving together the director's past, present, and future," and a beautiful enigma worth the wait. Polygon's Cezary Jan Strusiewicz praised the fantasy sequences as "absolutely beautiful," including shots of "the classic impossibly delicious-looking Ghibli food." He wrote that the film rewards repeat viewing. The Japan Times' Matt Schley gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars, saying certain moments left him breathless.

  Outside Japan, early reviews were "unanimously positive." The BBC's Caryn James gave it 5 out of 5 stars, calling it the "most expansive and magisterial" Miyazaki film. She wrote that it "amounts to a summing up of many strands of his long career." IGN's Rafael Motamayor called it Ghibli's "most visually complex film" and scored it 9 out of 10. The Guardian's Radheyan Simonpillai was the outlier, awarding 3 out of 5 stars and calling it "a gentler and slower though no less soulful addition to his canon."

  Looper later placed it 10th on its list of the top fifty PG-13 films, and Collider named it the best fantasy film of the 2020s so far. In June 2025, IndieWire ranked it fifth on its list of the 100 best movies of the 2020s so far. The following month, readers of The New York Times voted it in at 290th on the paper's list of the 100 best films of the century.

  The National Board of Review named it one of the top 10 films of 2023. It went on to win Best Animated Feature Film at the Academy Awards and the BAFTA Awards. It won the same category at the Golden Globe Awards and the Japanese Academy Film Prize. It also picked up multiple Annie Award nominations, spanning directing, writing, storyboarding, character animation, music, and production design. None of these prizes said anything about what was happening, at the same time, to the novel that had lent the film its title.

• 7. Ripple Effects

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  After the film's release, copies of Genzaburō Yoshino's 1937 novel How Do You Live? briefly vanished from Japanese shelves. The publisher moved to reprint the book, while secondhand copies turned up in bulk listings on the Mercari marketplace app.

  On the 20th of July 2023, Iwanami Shoten announced on its official Twitter account that the novel's total circulation had reached 1.8 million copies. That made it the best-selling title in the history of the publisher's Iwanami Bunko imprint.

  The Hollywood Reporter's Gavin J. Blair argued the film was a significant contributor to a wider revival of Japanese pop culture in the West. He named it alongside Godzilla Minus One from 2023 and the first season of One Piece, also from 2023. He also pointed to the first season of Shōgun, from 2024. Those three titles, arriving within about a year of Mahito's story, suggest the appetite Blair described was only beginning to be counted.