The creativity of the acclaimed animation director Hayao Miyazaki, responsible for films such as Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle, returns to the big screen after ten years of waiting. This Friday, the latest Studio Ghibli film, translated into English as The boy and the heron, was released in theaters in Japan. A production that since its inception has been surrounded by mystery due to the non-promotion campaign that the company has decided to carry out.
The film bears the same title as the 1937 novel written by Genzaburo Yoshino, but the story is completely original and is written by Miyazaki himself, who is currently 82 years old. Until the day of the premiere, it was not possible to find out information about the plot or the characters of the work, since Studio Ghibli itself opted for an unorthodox marketing strategy: not to show any type of synopsis, trailer or advertisement.
In recent months, the Japanese studio had only presented a promotional poster and had wanted to keep the details of the work secret. This peculiar decision responds to different reasons: “A poster and a title, that’s all we had when we were kids. I enjoyed trying to imagine what a movie was about and I wanted to get that feeling back,” explained Toshio Suzuki, a producer at Studio Ghibli, in an interview with NHK.
In another interview with the Japanese medium Bungei Shunji, Suzuki showed his rejection of the big advertising companies by referring to a Hollywood production whose name he did not specify: “They made three trailers for the movie and released them all at once. If you see all three , you know everything that’s going to happen. So how do viewers feel about it? There must be people who, after seeing all the trailers, don’t want to go see the movie. I wanted to do the opposite of that.”
As a result of the non-existent promotion of the film, the synopsis of The boy and the heron could not be known until some attendees viewed the work and shared their opinion on networks.
According to specialized media, The boy and the heron is set in Japan during World War II and focuses on a boy named Mahito, whose mother dies in a fire. The protagonist and his father move out of town to start living with the late mother’s sister, whom the father eventually marries. Mahito, resenting his aunt for taking his mother’s place, begins to explore the area around his house, where he discovers a mysterious building. There he meets a talking heron (the bird on the poster), who claims that the protagonist’s mother is alive and waiting to be rescued.
Miyazaki had not released a film since 2013, the year in which he released The Wind Rises and announced his retirement for reasons of age – he was 72 years old and believed that he would not have the strength to tackle a new production. However, in 2016 he decided to direct one last film, the current The boy and the heron, which was to be released during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but has finally come out this summer after seven years of creation.
The boy and the heron lasts for 124 minutes and its soundtrack is composed by Joe Hisaishi. Local media say that the new Ghibli movie brought together a multitude of attendees on its opening day despite the lack of promotion. At the moment, the film has been shown in some 400 theaters throughout Japan and the distributor GKIDS confirmed that it will arrive in the United States at the end of 2023. The release date for Europe is still unknown.
