The Final Film from Visionary Animator Hayao Myazaki is a phrase that’s been pushed before in marketing, but maybe this time Studio Ghibli totally means it for sure, no take-backs, not a hoax, The Boy and the Heron is absolutely the animation master’s swan song from his beloved medium and then they’re unplugging all his screens and no longer accepting his notes on their future productions, which will merely have to do the best they can without his sage guidance and relentless perfectionism. Hopefully Ghibli’s next phase goes far better than that time Disney ushered in a new artistic era for themselves and the result was Chicken Little.

Thanks to a Turner Classic Movies marathon from about 20-25 years ago, I’ve seen nine of his films (Castle in the Sky was my favorite), but I’m not exactly a hardcore anime superfan. His last film I saw was Ponyo, which came to America in 2008, in pre-MCC times. Somehow those fifteen years flew by. Like many of his other films, his farewell address is an old-school cel-animated beauty — either a letter of encouragement to his successors or one last scolding before they ruin everything. The Moral of the Story depends on which character you think is the protagonist here.

Not unlike Japan’s other big 2023 international sensation Godzilla Minus One (both films hit Stateside within a week of Pearl Harbor Day), The Boy and the Heron is a fantasy epic and a meditation on grief set in the 1940s, centered on a young man on a quest of sorts, in which a large creature disturbs his calm and sends him out of his comfort zone to witness and perform feats he never would’ve thought possible in reality. Whereas GMO is mostly set after World War II, TBatH happens years earlier and its creatures are much shorter than the average kaiju unless you place them all in a single stack. Some would be more amenable to this challenge than others.

Our young sort-of hero Mahito Maki (voiced by Soma Santoki, who was in a 2021 Japanese remake of Cube) mourns the recent death of his mother, apparently not war-related. He and his dad, voiced by Takuya Kimura (2046, Howl’s Moving Castle), move away from the big city with his aunt-turned-stepmom Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura, who once did Showtime’s Masters of Horror and the Japanese dubs for all three Jurassic Worlds) out to her family’s old place in the countryside, escaping WWII a la the Pevensie kids. Much like that quartet and the magical land they soon discovered and eventually ruled, Mahito soon finds himself lured from our dimension by a mysterious figure — not a satyr, but rather an irritable grey heron that develops metamorphosing issues, voiced by Masaki Suda (who was also in the Cube remake and The Great War of Archimedes, which we were just talking about the other day). Shenanigans bring them to a mystical forest tower that leads, as such constructs must, to the farthest regions of Miyazaki’s imagination.

Beyond a certain point, describing the sights along the way can only become increasingly subjective as we wade through imagery and interactions meant to be interpreted on a one-by-one personal basis by You, The Viewers at Home. Longtime Miyazaki followers will nod knowingly at magical elderly women, cute pudgy floating spirits, twists more figurative than literal, occasional disregard for plot-mechanical cause-and-effect, and allusions to Japanese legends that may bewilder us more ignorant passersby. Participating lifeforms include schoolyard bullies, a plague of frogs, attack pelicans, way too many parakeets, a Firestarter, at least one character’s alt-timeline version, and, most crucially above all others, Mahito’s wizened granduncle (Shōhei Hino, who played Tojo in a somewhat lousy 2013 Matthew Fox WWII vehicle called Emperor). The proceedings are more than a bit busy and there’s a lot of bird warfare. This tower is not a safe place for even the cutest li’l feathery flyer.

The granduncle may or may not be the key to it all. The panoply of otherworldly chaos distracts Mahito only slightly from his grief as he reckons with a strange legacy that may or may not be his to grapple. As viewers marvel at the spectacle and struggle to scorecard any of it or track which characters have traveled from which parts of the tower to which other parts, and in which time frames they’re currently existing, and what’s going on with Dad out in the real world to the extent that it matters, the most climactic scenes (not counting battles between various factions) come as Mahito listens to Granduncle explain maybe 1% of all this at best, while pondering what will happen to his dominion and his works after he’s gone. The pivotal point for the viewer’s interpretation is a metaphor involving a toy with some assembly required. To the viewer predicting an ordinary cartoon’s happy ending, Mahito represents youthful hope for the future. To anyone who notices philosophical resemblances between Granduncle and Miyazaki himself, the takeaway feels like a pessimistic prophecy of doom for a decades-old bastion of quality entertainment magic.

Whichever path the sometimes equivocal, never-dull adventure leads the audience’s interpretation to, the journey through The Boy and the Heron is worth the time, the concentration, and the absorbing provocation of a near-lost art form…if only to see that annoying heron eventually suffer some consequences.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: In an uncommon move, our local theaters carried the movie in dubbed and subbed versions. My son and I prefer dubbed. Other voices in that version include Ko Shibasaki (the psychotic Mitsuko in the original Battle Royale) as another tower denizen; Kaoru Kobayashi (Princess Mononoke) as a leading pelican: and as the arrogant and peculiarly muscular Parakeet King, celebrated actor Jun Kunimura, whose career highlights have been as diverse as Miike’s Audition, Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, both volumes of Kill Bill, Godzilla: Final Wars, and the aforementioned The Great War of Archimedes. (Look, I just really liked Archimedes, okay?)

if you like watching characters with mismatched lip movements and would rather die than be caught reading, the Americanized version is loaded with a ludicrously all-star lineup: Robert Pattinson, Mark Hamill, Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe, Dave Bautista, Eternals‘ Gemma Chan, Suicide Squad‘s Karen Fukuhara, and more, more, more! Have fun with that!

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after The Boy and the Heron end credits. After the short list of collaborators, the final cel contains no images, no corporate logos, no products, no Special Thanks, nor a marketing-department vow that “THE BOY WILL RETURN.” It ends with eleven simple words, which have an entire blue frame to themselves: “Original Story and Screen Play Written and Directed by Hayao Miyazaki.” That’s it, that’s The End.