Everything We Know About ‘The Boy and the Heron’

Photo: Steve Granitz/WireImage

If you were expecting a typical Hollywood rollout from Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki, oops. Maybe only in a world with an enchanted forest and fluffy monsters. How Do You Live?, Miyazaki’s final feature film, is getting a new name for its upcoming international release, now titled The Boy and the Heron for audiences outside of Japan. Keeping a similar tone to the Japanese release, the film distributed by GKIDS will have limited promotional materials, despite the film premiering in Japan already. Fear not! There are a few stills from the movie to keep you waiting until its official North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7.

In an interview with the Japanese magazine Bungei Shunji earlier this year, the film’s producer (and Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator) Toshio Suzuki revealed that there would be no trailers, no voice cast lists, no nothing for their film. “As part of company operations, over the years Ghibli has wanted people to come see the movies we’ve made. So we’ve thought about that and done a lot of different things for that purpose — but this time we were like, ‘Eh, we don’t need to do that,’” Suzuki explained. “Doing the same thing you’ve done before, over and over, you get tired of it. So we wanted to do something different.”

There’s only so much we do know about the film: It’s based on the 1937 novel of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino and described as “fantasy on a grand scale.” There’s also a theme song to the film by Kenshi Yonezu called “Spinning Globe” available to stream, giving us a little bit of what the movie’s vibe might be like. But … that’s it. If it is anything like Miyazaki’s other films, it will be fantastical and make us cry a little too hard. The Boy and the Heron came out on July 14 in Japan, and international release dates are coming soon through GKIDS in North America.