This review was originally published on September 8, 2023. The Boy and the Heron is now available to rent or buy on digital platforms . Everyone has their favorite Hayao M iyazaki movie , and mine is Porco Rosso , the 1992 adventures of a World War I flying ace turned bounty hunter with the face of a swine — a transformation that reflects how disillusioned he has become with humanity.
Late in that film, Porco tells the story of his best friend’s death in a dogfight. Unable to save him, Porco flies up into the clouds and emerges into a still space above them, where he watches the planes of everyone who was shot down in the battle drift up to join a dense band of aircraft high in the sky — their earthly allegiances incidental in this aerial procession of the dead that Porco, who remains alive, is unable to join. That sequence is, for me, the best thing Studio Ghibli has ever produced, the beauty of aviation paired with the violence it visits upon people, all of it rendered in imagery that’s fantastical and inexpressibly sad.
Miyazaki returns to that idea in the tremendous The Boy and the Heron , his first film in a decade, when 12-year-old Mahito Maki (voiced by Soma Santoki) finds his way to a magical kingdom of strange seas dotted with islands and overgrown shipwrecks. On the horizon is a dense line of sails, ones attached to boats that, he learns, aren’t real. They’re rowed by shadowy figures who, like everyone else in the place, seem to be perpetually in need of.
