Disclaimer: this review does contain some minor spoilers for Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron.

For many of us, the last Studio Ghibli movie came out when we were still in elementary school, maybe younger. While the most recent film produced by the renowned Japanese animation studio, When Marnie Was There, came out in 2014, it was not made by the director who made the name Ghibli famous. 

Hayao Miyazaki, whose last film, The Wind Rises, released in 2013, is the legendary animator that has made Studio Ghibli a household name. In the past decade, Miyazaki, who originally planned for The Wind Rises to be his final film, has been through a lot. Most notably, one of his closest friends and Studio Ghibli co-founders, Isao Takahata, passed away. The death of someone so close to Miyazaki put a total stop to the pre-production process on what was then an early version of a movie called How Do You Live?, which was later renamed to The Boy and the Heron.

The film, which has been said to be Miyazaki’s “most personal,” is quintessentially Ghibli. It explores the terrible grief experienced by Miyazaki growing up during World War II in Japan, as well as themes of love, family bonds, and finding one’s purpose in life. In many ways it is also a love letter to Studio Ghibli, as the titular heron was based on Ghibli co-founder and president Toshio Suzuki (voiced in the English dub by Robert Pattinson), and the movie’s granduncle wizard character was based on the late Isao Takahata (voiced in the dub by Mark Hamill), who was a mentor figure to Miyazaki.

The Boy and the Heron follows Mahito, a boy who, after the death of his mother, moves with his father to the countryside to his mother’s ancestral home. There he encounters a gray heron who promises to lead him to his mother. So Mahito embarks on a journey to a realm of brave spirits and ghosts with the scheming heron as his guide.

Although this film did not hit me personally as hard as some of Hayao Miayazaki’s other movies have, it definitely impressed on me a strange sense of melancholy that I have found is pretty standard across his body of work. The Boy and the Heron explores what it means to grow up, what it means to take responsibility for yourself, and tries to answer the question: how do you live?

For those still wanting to see the movie in theaters, its theatrical run has been extended by a few more weeks at least in the US as of Wednesday, Dec. 20. I would highly recommend experiencing this film for the first time on the big screen.