Highlights
- "The Boy and the Heron" is Hayao Miyazaki's highly anticipated final film, described as his most visually ambitious project yet.
- A promotional video from North American distributor GKIDS reveals the film's English-language logo and announces an upcoming official trailer.
- The film, which explores themes of life, death, and creation, is a semi-autobiographical fantasy from the mind of Miyazaki and draws inspiration from the novel "How Do You Live?"
The final film from Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron hardly needs an introduction as one of the biggest film events of the year. Originally teased under the working title of “How Do You Live?” in reference to a classic 1937 Japanese young-adult novel, the film has been described as one of Miyazaki’s most visually ambitious projects ever.
Now, after a distinct and intentional lack of marketing from Studio Ghibli for the Japanese domestic box office, North American distributor GKIDS has broken the silence and announced its first promotional video for the film.
For those hoping for a trailer for the film, this video has some good news and some bad news. Bad news first—there’s no actual animation or visuals, and the video essentially uses only text to describe the setup of the film.
The good news, though, is that it has an announcement date for the official trailer in the next few days. In addition to unveiling the film’s English-language logo graphic, GKIDS’ “Introduction” video has promised its first full teaser to release on Wednesday, September 6.
Despite its lack of visuals from the film, GKIDS’s first video still illuminates a lot of the tone and emotional weight of The Boy and the Heron. The introduction to the film’s story is, even its text, arranged in a decidedly poetic layout:
A young boy named Mahito
yearning for his mother
ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead.
There, death comes to an end,
and life finds a new beginning.
Accompanied by a haunting choral performance, the film is further described as thus:
A semi-autobiographical fantasy
about life, death and creation,
in tribute to friendship,
from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.
This is a film that works on several connected levels of inspiration, both being a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical rumination by Miyazaki himself, in addition to taking certain indirect thematic influences from How Do You Live? the novel. The film’s themes of the living and the dead, the human world intertwined with the world of spirits, has been one of the most recurring motifs across Miyazaki’s filmography.
While The Boy and the Heron had an almost-unprecedented lack of promotion for the domestic Japanese box office—despite being the most expensive Japanese film ever—GKIDS’s North American promotional technique is gearing up for both a top-tier festival run and an inevitable A-list Oscars bid. The film is currently set for its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival following the first teaser next week, in addition to further showings at the BFI London Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the San Sebastian Film Festival. The film is currently slated for a theatrical wide-release later in 2023.