Anime / The Boy and the Heron

"Your presence is requested."

A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother
ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead.
There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning.

— Introduction from the teaser trailer

The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka, lit. "How Do You Live?") is the twelfth film by director Hayao Miyazaki and the 23rd film from Studio Ghibli. Joe Hisaishi did the score for the film.

Set in Japan during World War II, the story follows young Mahito Maki who evacuates to the country after his mother's death where he encounters a talking heron at an abandoned tower and embarks on a fantastical adventure in a strange world.

Distributed by Toho, the film was theatrically released in Japan on July 14, 2023, and was screened in both traditional theaters and premium formats such as IMAX. GKIDS acquired the North American rights and oversaw the international premier at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival before theatrically releasing the film on December 8, 2023. The English dub of the film includes the voices of Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson, and Florence Pugh.

The film would give Miyazaki his second Academy Award for Best Animated Feature after Spirited Away won for 2002 and is currently only the second anime film to win the Oscar in that category. (Those two also remain the only films to win the award using traditional hand-drawn animation.)

Previews: Teaser trailer, English dub trailer

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The Boy and the Heron contains examples of:

• Animal Motifs: Birds. Apart from the titular heron himself, birds predominate the fantasy world. All splendid creatures capable of flight, yet they are all still trapped to this world despite how high they fly to attempt to escape.
• Anti-Villain: True to form as a Miyazaki film, there is no true Big Bad of the story. The master of the tower did kidnap Hisako, Natsuko and Mahito, but he is dying and is trying to find an heir to maintain the world inside the tower. The Parakeet King is nasty and self-destructive, but ultimately not responsible for the plot itself and also driven by the desire to protect his people by maintaining the world they live in. Finally, the Heron is slippery and unreliable but also acting on the master's orders. He also becomes Fire-Forged Friends with Mahito.
• Art Shift: The citizens of Tokyo in the opening are drawn and animated in a notably different style from the rest of the movie, looking like background characters in a nightmare, which helps focus the scene on Mahito's personal tragedy.
• Ascended to Carnivorism:
  • The pelicans are an odd example. They already are carnivorous, but after being dragged into the alternate world, they are forced to eat the warawara, i.e. souls, because the fish they normally depend on are corrupted by malice and thus inedible. They are simply starving and desperate. When released from the tower, they presumably go back to their normal diet of fish.
  • The parakeets, normally seed-eaters, are a more standard example. The parakeets are quite happy to eat humans, but are more ascended to omnivorism. They are shown preparing fruits and vegetables for their banquet. They're all saved at the end when the tower collapses, allowing them to return to their natural states.
• Author Avatar: The film works as a fantastical autobiography of sorts for Hayao Miyazaki. Mahito works as the avatar of Miyazaki's younger self while the Granduncle can be seen as one for present-day Miyazaki as an elderly creator searching for a successor.
• Big Fancy House: Natsuko's estate in the country has extensive grounds and a staff of several maids.
• Bird-Poop Gag: Several times. After the first time the heron lands on Mahito's window, there's poop all over the windowsill. Mahito's father is spattered in poop after a swarm of parakeets flies out of the tower. The same happens with Mahito and Natsuko after they escape from the tower at the end.
• Bittersweet Ending: Mahito accepts Natsuko as his mother and they escape back to their world, as do the bird inhabitants of the alternate world with the final scene revealing that Mahito's family survives the war and return to Tokyo. But birds become normal animals, the alternate world is no more, Granduncle is dead, the heron tells Mahito that he'll eventually forget about his adventure and Himi returns to her time despite Mahito's warning of her fate, as she grows up to be his mother.
• A Boy and His X: A boy and a heron.
• Bungled Suicide: A possible interpretation of Mahito's self harm with the rock. Given how troubled he is, this is understandable.
• Casting Gag: In the Latin American Spanish dub, Alfonso Herrera (The Grey Heron) also voiced another bird, in this case as Mack in Migration, with both movies being released at December 2023. Likewise, in the same dubbed version, this is not the first time we hear Emilio Treviño (Mahito) voicing another hero dealing with his dead mother.
• Collateral Damage: Himi's flames wind up burning some of the Warawara, while stopping the Pelicans from eating them.
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Arrow example: After his initial attempts to hunt the Heron fail, Mahito turns one of its tail feathers into fletching for an arrow. This appears to give the arrow the ability to fly on its own, as it launches itself from his bow the first time he draws with it, and when he draws it at the Heron, it launches from his hand and chases after the Heron before spearing his beak.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The parakeets and their king use a lot of Fascist imagery, Granduncle states they've taken over most of his world (in a story set in Japan during World War II), they appear benign and seem to have good intentions but are really cannibalistic monsters, and the young Mahito's hesitancy to inherit the world leads to the Parakeet King attempting to restore it instead, resulting in its complete destruction.
• Downer Beginning: The film opens with the death of Mahito's mother, who perishes (offscreen) in a hospital fire in Tokyo.
• Even Evil Has Standards: When Mahito asks the parakeets if they’re going to eat him like he assumes they ate Natsuko, they respond that they didn’t eat her because she had a baby inside of her and they don’t eat babies. Which is a pretty low bar, because evidently they consider a child Mahito's age to be fair game.
• Fantasy Keepsake: After his adventure, Mahito reveals he took one of Grand-Uncle's discarded blocks. The Heron warns its power will fade over time, and with it so will Mahito's memories of the other world.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The fisherwoman's kimono has the same pattern as Kiriko's, hinting that she is Kiriko's younger self.
  • Lady Himi's fiery powers hint at her true identity as a young Hisako, who was killed in a deadly hospital fire.
  • The Parakeets have erected a shoddy set of staircases to reach the tower's upper levels, which their King destroys to delay Mahito. The King would then try to take Grand-Uncle's place in erecting a tower with the new blocks, only for his structure to be as poorly built as the stairs and collapse immediately.
• Furry Confusion: Played for Laughs in one scene where the Parakeet King's two guards are startled at seeing wild parrots in Granduncle's garden and refer to them as their "ancestors".
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The meteor that crashed into Granduncle's estate all those years ago holds some sort of hovering core at the center of it that allows Granduncle to become the creator deity of dimensions born of his own imagination. He explains he entered a contract with it that allowed him to accomplish this, but precisely what the floating rock is - whether it's a god, alien, some incomprehensible form of technology, or otherwise - is neither elaborated on or the actual focus of the movie.
• Gonk: The old women living on the estate are cartoonishly grotesque, especially in comparison to the younger characters. The Heron isn't any better in his more humanoid form, being a tengu and all.
• The Great Offscreen War: The film takes place during World War II, but after Hisako dies in a hospital fire during the opening scene the plot moves to the countryside, where the war is only apparent through home front activities like the production of airplanes. The final scene reveals that no-one else in the cast died from the war. This is justified due to Studio Ghibli's third animated feature, Grave of the Fireflies, already tackling an onscreen depiction of the firebombings on Japan.
• In Name Only: While the film shares its Japanese title with the 1937 novel How Do You Live?, it's largely an original story, although the book does appear in-story as a gift for Mahito from his mother.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Once they leave the world within the tower, people remember nothing of their time within it Kiriko and Hisako lost all memory of their experiences. While Mahito retains his memory thanks to holding on to one of the building bricks, the Heron implies he will eventually forget as well.
• Lonely Piano Piece: To bring out the film's melancholic and introspective tone, the film has a very minimalistic score that is mostly focused on piano pieces.
• Magic Meteor: The tower is revealed to have been built in the crater of a meteor impact, using the leftover shell of the meteor itself as its foundations.
• Metaphorically True: The Heron tells Mahito that his mother is in the tower. What he doesn't say is when she entered the tower. Due to the odd way in which time flows inside the tower, Himi, who entered the tower decades ago when she was roughly Mahito's age, and then left a year later from the perspective of the world outside the tower to eventually grow up to be Mahito's mother, is still there.
• Miniature Senior Citizens: The housestaff in Natsuko's estate consists of several old women and one old man. Mahito is taller than all of them apart from Kiriko.
• Missing Mom: Mahito's mother Hisako dies in hospital fire in the opening scene of the film. Her body is never recovered.
• Never Found the Body: Invoked. The Heron uses this trope as an argument to convince Mahito that Hisako is still alive. Ultimately, this is a lie. While Hisako's younger self, nicknamed "Himi", is later encountered in the world below the tower, she traveled there from the timeframe of her own childhood. Her adult self truly did perish in the hospital fire.
• Or Was It a Dream?: Mahito dreams about confronting the Heron with a bokken, only for the bird to shatter half of the blade with its beak. After waking, Mahito finds the bokken still intact only for half of the blade to shatter while he holds it.
• Orphean Rescue: The Heron tries to goad Mahito into entering the old tower by claiming his mother is alive inside of it. Mahito is skeptical and repudiates him, and only enters the tower when the master of the tower takes Natsuko.
• Parent with New Paramour: Mahito struggles to accept Natsuko as his stepmother at first, despite the latter's attempts to bond with the young boy.
• Recurring Element: The Warawara follow the theme of fantasy Ghibli movies having a cute blobby spirit as a mascot, following the Susuwatari from My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, and the Kodama from Princess Mononoke.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Warawara, a bunch of adorable white blob creatures who ascend into the sky and are the souls of unborn children.
• Rope Bridge: A stair-based variant. The Parakeet King is climbing a set of ramshackle wooden stairs built within the tower when he notices Mahito is chasing him. The King uses his sword and boots to break the stairs free of their moorings at the top, causing the structure to crumble.
• Shout-Out:
  • How Do You Live? appears in-story as a gift Mahito's mother left for him.
  • The "The Noun and the Noun" title for the North American release must have been a reference to one of Hayao Miyazaki's favorite animated films The King and the Mockingbird, which is equally as surrealist as this movie. As you might have guessed from the title, that movie also has a talking bird.
  • The tomb is clearly inspired by Arnold Böcklin‘s painting Isle Of The Dead.
• Surrealism: Perhaps Miyazaki's most surrealist work, with many imagery and environments feel something out of Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Girogio de Chirico's paintings.
• Talking Animal: The Heron begins to speak to Mahito shortly after it first meets him. The inside of the tower has entire civilizations of talking birds, including pelicans and parakeets.
• Transfer Student Uniforms: Mahito's white school uniform stands out compared to the more drab uniforms and clothing of the other students in his new school.
• Uplifted Animal: The parakeets in the alternate land originate from ordinary parakeets that Granduncle used to populate his world. They've become large, heavy, and have lost their long tails, in addition to having Ascended to Carnivorism. A pair briefly see some actual parakeets and refer to them as their "ancestors". In contrast, the pelicans, which have a similar backstory, are largely realistic aside from being able to talk. Ultimately they both return to their normal selves when the tower is destroyed.
• Unanthropomorphic Transformation: Whenever anthropomorphic animals from the alternate land enter the real world, they are forcibly transformed into feral counterparts. The same applies for the storm that destroys the alternate world when the Parakeet King is turned into a real parakeet.
• Wham Line: One of the grannies finally reveals to Mahito's father just how strange the estate grounds are: "[The tower in the forest] fell from the sky during the Meiji Restoration!!" The line is practically blurted out, marking a sudden shift in atmosphere as it's shown that the tower was merely constructed around a bizarre meteor that crashed to earth.
• Worth It: Himi firmly intends to return to her own time despite knowing full well that she will die, because not doing so means that she would never give birth to Mahito.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: The parakeets assure Mahito that they don't eat babies so Natsuko is safe from them. However, they do consider Mahito old enough to eat.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: Time inside the tower has only a tangential relationship to time outside the tower. Inside it, Mahito meets a younger version of the housekeeper Kiriko, and even his own mother Hisako. Both of them had apparently entered the tower at different points earlier on in their life and are there until they can return to their own time outside.

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