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Review | The Boy and the Heron movie review: Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese animation legend, goes out on a high – if this does turn out to be his final film
- In what could be anime giant Hayao Miyazaki’s last film (the 82-year-old has retired before, remember), a boy looks for his mother in second world war Japan
- After moving with his father and dad’s new bride to a farm, the boy encounters a goblin that looks like a heron and tells him his mother is still alive
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4/5 stars
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“I have grown old,” says a wizened, mystical character in The Boy and The Heron, announcing that he seeks a successor. Undoubtedly it’s a line that resonates, for this is the latest – and possibly last, as they always say – film by Japanese animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki.
The co-founder of Studio Ghibli and director of such avowed classics as My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away is 82 years old. He last made a film in 2013, The Wind Rises, before announcing his retirement.
That proved premature – with The Boy and the Heron now upon us, after an unusual release in Japan in July with no trailers, synopsis or even casting reveals.
An original story written by Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron follows a boy’s search for his mother, who is said to have died in a fire in Tokyo in 1943 during the second world war.
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The boy, Mahito (Soma Santoki), is unable to come to terms with his mother’s death, or the fact his father, Shoichi (Takuya Kimura), is now marrying his mother’s younger sister Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura) and moving the family to the countryside.
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