The Boy and the Heron.

I’m an avowed Hayao Miyazaki fan, having seen every film he’s directed or written other than his first, 1978’s The Castle of Cagliostro, some of them multiple times. My Neighbor Totoro is a favorite of all of my kids, and my daughter has a modest collection of Totoro-themed trinkets, while I’d rank Spirited Away among the best animated films I’ve ever seen for the complexity of its story and the way it blends fantasy and a very specific form of psychological horror. After 2013’s The Wind Rises, Miyazaki announced his retirement (not for the first time), and it seemed right as that was one of his weaker films. Maybe he’d just lost his fastball in his 70s.

He unretired at some point in the interim, spending seven years making his latest and likely final film, The Boy and the Heron. It certainly feels like a swan song, with a story that’s inspired by his own childhood and is told through his typical lens of fantasy, nature, and food, and ending on a beautiful note that seems to say goodbye to all that. It’s very Miyazaki, enough to satisfy his longtime fans, but takes a darker tone for much of the story than anything else he’s done in the last twenty years.

The Boy is Mahito Maki, a young child in Japan in World War II whose mother dies when the Tokyo hospital where she works burns down. Soon after, Mahito’s father marries his late wife’s sister, Notsuko, and they move to her estate in the countryside to escape the bombing. While there, Mahito encounters a talking, taunting heron, and wanders into an abandoned tower on the property with a haunted history. You can probably guess that we’re going in that tower, with the heron, and very strange things are going to happen there, which would be correct, as Notsuko – by then very pregnant – wanders into the forest as if in a trance, and Mahito goes on a quest to find her that takes him into another world, one populated by angry parakeets, starving pelicans, little white sprites called wara-wara, and the solution to more than just the mystery of Notsuko’s disappearance.

The Boy and the Heron is chock full of Miyazaki staples, starting with the unbelievable landscapes, lush with greens and vibrant floral tones – a reminder that hand-drawn animation is still capable of blowing us away by evoking the same sort of sensations we get from the ultra-realism of modern CGI. There are adorable tiny creatures made for merchandising in the adorable wara-wara, just like the soot sprites of Totoro. There’s food, a lot of it, which somehow looks delicious even when it doesn’t look very real. And there’s magic of the Miyazaki variety, like fire witches and talking herons (well, just one) and a hallway of doors that lead to different worlds. It’s not fan service, but it’s comfort food for fans all the same.

Where The Boy and the Heron succeeds is the way it layers a metaphorical version of Miyazaki’s life and career on top of the actual story of Mahito. Mothers in hospitals and cities under attack are common motifs in his films, both drawn from his own childhood, as is the distant relationship Mahito has with his own father – a pattern Miyazaki has said he’s repeated with his older son Goro, who has directed several Studio Ghibli films himself. A large portion of the plot concerns the ideas of world-building and the responsibilities of a creator (or, by extension, an artist), and when the movie ends by closing a literal door on one of those worlds, it feels like Miyazaki himself saying he’s done as a filmmaker. Mahito’s entire story arc from the moment he meets the heron – voiced in the English dub by an unrecognizable Robert Pattinson – seems to serve as a loosely figurative interpretation of Miyazaki’s career in animation, from his first encounters with the form through the fifteen years he worked before writing and directing his first feature to his reluctant decision(s) to walk away.

There’s a long period where Mahito is in the other world where the story loses some momentum, between his encounter with the wara-wara and his entry into the tower, and the film probably could have benefited from some editing here – not that anyone was likely to tell Miyazaki what to do with his own film. Some of this comes together in the ending, including the meaning of the tower, although Miyazaki also leaves some things unexplained, as is his wont; the conclusion turns out to be incredibly moving, especially through that lens of him using the hall of doors and Mahito’s choice to pass through one as his own way of saying to audiences that he’s done. It’s in the upper half of his films, and if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or the sheer joy of Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service, it’s a wonderful and moving way to end a Hall of Fame career.

The Boy and the Heron just won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, which has gone to the eventual winner of the Oscar in that category in 75% of the years since the Globes introduced their category, including the last three winners. The Oscar race feels like it’s coming down to this film, a hand-drawn marvel that’s the Academy’s final chance to honor a legend in the field, against Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, one of the most innovative animated films ever and the sequel to a past winner. I think the Spider-Verse movie is the more worthy winner, but The Boy and the Heron is more likely to win, and my sentimental side hopes it does. Miyazaki has only won this honor once, for Spirited Away, and only been nominated two other times, as the Academy passed over Ponyo and two films he wrote but didn’t direct, Arrietty and From Up on Poppy Hill. Giving The Boy and the Heron this award would be the sort of lifetime achievement honor the Academy seems to love, and the film itself would be the easy choice in most years anyway.