The Boy and the Heron (How Do You Live?)
A semi-autobiographical wartime fantasy; won the Best Animated Feature Oscar (2024), the studio's second. Miyazaki's latest 'final' film - though a new project is reportedly in the works.
Overview
The Boy and the Heron, released in Japan under a title often rendered as How Do You Live?, is Hayao Miyazaki's late-career plunge into grief, inheritance and surreal fantasy. Mahito, a boy displaced by wartime loss and family upheaval, encounters a strange heron and enters a tower-world where memory, death, creation and monstrous birds do not queue politely for explanation.
The film is dense, dreamlike and intensely personal. It feels less like Miyazaki offering a tidy farewell than emptying several locked rooms of his imagination at once and inviting the audience to mind the stairs.
Why it matters
It matters because any new Miyazaki film would matter, but this one carries the additional weight of age, legacy and artistic self-questioning. It is full of echoes: mothers, flight, war, strange helpers, threatening appetites, worlds built by old men and children asked to decide what to inherit.
The film is not a simple adaptation of Genzaburo Yoshino's novel, though the book's title and moral presence hover around it. This is Miyazaki using the idea of "how do you live?" as a personal and artistic question, not merely as source material to illustrate.
What to expect
Expect a film that is beautiful, unsettling and less immediately accessible than some Ghibli classics. The narrative proceeds with dream logic. Characters and images arrive carrying symbolic weight rather than neat labels.
There is grief, wartime fire, body horror-adjacent bird imagery, family anxiety and moments of wonder. Some younger viewers may find it confusing or frightening. Many adults may find it confusing too, but with better vocabulary.
Adaptations and versions
The Boy and the Heron is a Studio Ghibli theatrical film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, loosely connected in title and theme to Genzaburo Yoshino's 1937 novel. Because it is comparatively recent, current release, award and availability details should be final-checked before publication.
It stands alone within the Ghibli catalogue.
Where to start
Do not make this the first Miyazaki film for a child unless you know their tolerance for strange, grief-soaked fantasy. For adults familiar with his work, it is essential.
It benefits from knowing the earlier films, not for plot reasons but because the echoes are part of the experience.
Verdict The SFcrowsnest take
The Boy and the Heron is strange, sorrowful and magnificent in flashes: a late Miyazaki labyrinth about grief, creation and the terrible freedom of choosing how to live. It does not hand over every key. That may be the point.