"The Boy and the Heron" is a long-awaited film by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of incredible films My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke. Despite rumors of "The Boy and the Heron" being a final film by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio GHIBLI has confirmed that Miyazaki has not retired. The completion of the film has rekindled the director's confidence and enthusiasm to continue working on other stories.

"The Boy and the Heron" is a semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki. Its Japanese title, “Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka”, literally meaning “How do you live?”, is borrowed from an eponymous novel by Genzaburo Yoshino that filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was given in his youth by his mother. What’s more, certain events from Miyazaki’s childhood are depicted in this new animated feature for the first time ever. Its story takes place in a past Japan that still exists vividly within Miyazaki’s memories. 

After losing his mother in a fire in Tokyo, 11-year-old Mahito moves to the countryside with his father Shoichi to take up residence at the Gray Heron Mansion, a fusion of Japanese and Western architecture on a sprawling leafy estate. Mahito struggles with his complex feelings toward his bold and forceful father, as well as his new stepmother Natsuko, who also happens to be his late mother’s younger sister. Isolation and alienation drive Mahito to self-harm and shut himself off inside his new home. Everything changes when he is visited by a gray heron, who eventually reveals himself to be the avian guise of a shapeshifting “heron man”. Led by the gray heron, Mahito ventures further into the dark corners of the estate, where time and space begin to warp, dreams and reality blend into one another, and a world far beyond exerts an inescapable pull. He sets foot into a world where life and death exist on the same plane.