The Boy and the Heron (2023)

4 Stars (out of 4)

Cosmic Wings

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Ten years after retiring, the master animator Hayao Miyazaki returns with a film that feels much more satisfying, and more personal, than his previous "final" film, The Wind Rises. The Boy and the Heron is a surreal, dreamlike adventure like Spirited Away, and an ode to the magic of flight (something that has preoccupied Miyazaki in most of his works). It's endlessly inventive, conjuring up fantastic, uncanny, and often unsettling imagery at every turn, as if it were all effortless. A young boy, Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki in Japanese and Luca Padovan in English) loses his mother to a fire in the hospital where she worked. His father (voiced by Takuya Kimura in Japanese and Christian Bale in English) remarries, taking Mahito's aunt Natsuko (voiced by Yoshino Kimura in Japanese and Gemma Chan in English) as his new bride. They move to the countryside, where Natsuko reveals that she is pregnant. Mahito encounters a strange gray heron (voiced by Masaki Suda in Japanese and Robert Pattinson in English) who frequently pesters him, and he begins exploring a mysterious tower. One day, Natsuko vanishes, and the heron tells Mahito that he can take him to her, as well as to Mahito's mother, who, the heron claims, is still alive. Thus begins a crazy adventure that shifts sideways whenever you least expect it, just like an incredible dream. There are killer pelicans, guardian figurines, adorable creatures called Warawara, killer parakeets, magic doors, younger versions of older characters, and an old man who must keep a teetering stack of blocks standing (the fate of the world hangs in the balance). It's pure magic, with more than a little darkness mixed in.