Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers. The entire plot is not disclosed within this article, so it may be hard to follow along if readers haven’t watched the movie.

Recently released as of 2023, The Boy and the Heron is Hayao Miyazaki’s (supposedly) last film under the animation studio known as Studio Ghibli. The story follows a young boy named Mahito who moves in with his father’s new wife and needs to learn how to adjust to his new life. His mother, his father’s first wife and his second wife’s sister, died in a fire whilst receiving care at a hospital, causing Mahito to have frequent nightmares. While exploring his stepmother’s estate, he comes across a heron who tells him that he knows where his mother is, and his step-mother, Natsuko, simultaneously mysteriously disappears into a forest. The Boy and the Heron is about Mahito’s journey to discover the truth behind his newfound relationships through messy supernatural dimensions and a chase with time to set his world turned upside down right again.

Although this story has a great deal to do with the supernatural and a magical realm which holds each dimension and point in time together, the magic of The Boy in the Heron comes from Mahito’s journey of self-discovery of accepting his new life and learning to move on. At the beginning of the story, he isn’t fully trusting of Natsuko and is apprehensive in approaching her as his new mother, but when he is called into the magical realm both to meet his mother for a final time and to bring his new step-mother back to their current timeline, he decides to take up the challenge. Despite the dangerous nature of the magical realm, he bravely searches for his step-mother with the help of the heron which he met earlier. When cornered by parakeet pirates set on eating him, he is saved by a girl named Lady Himi, who has the power of fire. They work together to find Natsuko and grow a close bond with each other. Eventually, when they find Natsuko, she refuses to leave, and after Mahito’s insistence, she uses magic to force him out of the room she has kept herself in. This forces Mahito to accept her and show his genuine intentions of wanting her as his mother, something which he had refused to do before. This is a major step in his acceptance of not only his new family, but his new situation which he must navigate without his mother.

When Mahito is chosen by his Great Uncle as the successor of the magical world, the parakeet pirate leader who previously tried to kill Mahito gets angry and forces himself to the Great Uncle’s study to prove his worthiness, which ends up in the collapse of the magical realm. In the race for power, the greed-driven parakeet ends up destroying the world which allowed him and the other parakeets to form their powerful society. Ultimately, Miyazaki depicts how pushing for absolution in one’s goals can lead to the destruction of everything else. In the race to escape the collapsing realm which connected all points in time together, Mahito must say goodbye to his mother for the final time. While he is reluctant to let history play out as it had, Himi reassures him that she wouldn’t have wanted it to happen any other way, citing her connection to fire in the magical realm as a reason not to be afraid of the fire which inevitably ends her life. Mahito and his step-mother make it out of the magical realm in the nick of time and all the immoral parakeet pirates turn into harmless normal-sized parakeets as they enter the real world again, showing the relativity in power through the setting. 

In the end, Mahito is welcomed by his overly-worried father and accepts his reality willingly. Through his journey, Mahito gains closure about his mother and becomes satisfied with his reality. Though his family has changed substantially and he will never turn back time to when his mother was alive, the viewer has a strong sense of contentment because Mahito himself has changed as well. Although he will never completely forget his mother, he has a new family to rely upon and an entire future to look ahead to. In my opinion, that character development is the magic of this story. Miyazaki’s ability to turn misfortune into hope and use of the supernatural to describe the realities of our society is just one of the many reasons for the adoration of not only The Boy and the Heron, but all of Miyazaki’s films.