Note: this review was originally published in July to coincide with the film’s Japanese premiere. It has been updated and republished for the film’s wide release in North America on December 8th.

The year is 1997, and famed Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki announced plans to retire following the release of Princess Mononoke, a film that set new records at the box office for Japanese animation and revolutionized the medium. The year is 2001, and Miyazaki announced plans to retire following the release of Spirited Away, saying he can no longer work on feature-length animated films. The year is 2013, and Miyazaki announced plans to retire following the release of The Wind Rises, saying that “If I said I wanted to [make another feature film], I would sound like an old man saying something foolish.”

The year is 2023, and Miyazaki is an old man saying something foolish by releasing a new film, titled How Do You Live in Japan and renamed The Boy and the Heron for the international market.

The point is, it’s hard to say with any certainty whether this will truly be the moment when Hayao Miyazaki steps away from feature animation for good. He’ll likely never step away from animation entirely, directing a new short for the Ghibli Museum during his last retirement, Boro the Caterpillar. (In June Studio Ghibli executive Junichi Nishioka said that Miyazaki was still working on new film ideas.) Until a few days before the Japanese premiere, it was also hard to say what this mysteriously titled final film would actually be about, following a bold PR strategy of, well, not doing any PR. Only a single poster for the film featuring a heron was released before its theatrical debut, without so much as press or preview screenings, trailers, screenshots, or even a synopsis.

Riding the train in the early hours of Friday morning to be one of the first to catch this all-new Miyazaki-directed feature film, The Boy and the Heron appeared to exist only as some mythical entity rather than a real film. In the absence of any news and in light of the single image’s striking repetitiveness, Japanese fans even resorted to creating memes of the bird, riffing on the name and the mystery surrounding it. Honestly, a part of me wondered if the whole thing was some trick, a ruse soon to be exposed to the world at last.

Another part wondered: if this film actually was real, what story would prompt Miyazaki out of his latest retirement? And how would I even discuss a film like this when even saying it exists could technically class as a spoiler?

I have that answer now. To give the minimal necessary introduction, the film opens during the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II, a hazy memory of the moment that young boy Mahito witnessed the death of his mother as the hospital she was in burned to the ground. The experience is seared in his mind like the erupting flames he witnessed, never truly moving on from the pain of this sudden loss. When Mahito joins his father to move out of Tokyo shortly after the war to live with his new (and already pregnant) partner in a large traditional home full of peculiarities — like a mysterious heron and an old abandoned stone building in the woods nearby — he struggles to accept this new situation.

These opening moments feel unsettling and heavy, especially in flashbacks, only briefly relieved by the kindly gaggle of old ladies at the home or the famed heron. While it embraces the fantastical as it takes us to a whole new world in pursuit of a far-from-normal heron’s promise that Mahito can see his mother once more (while continuing to search for his new mother who recently went missing), the weight of this opening lingers. 

In these moments, it’s a rich, dense fantasy in the vein we’ve come to expect, both in terms of the detail visible in every scene and its greater thematic purpose. You may come to Spirited Away for its eclectic and intricate spiritual bathhouse, but you stay for the human story and deeper undertones at its core.

Continuing this comparison, you could even say these musings on the complexity of the human condition are emphasized by the 82-year-old Miyazaki with this final film, creating something that feels more autobiographical and self-reflective than The Wind Rises. For all that film was technically a biopic, it felt as much a reflection of the man behind the production as it was the master aviator at its center. While fantastical and family-friendly elements litter The Boy and the Heron, filling it to the brim with whimsy that lightens its heavy moments and brings endless charm to its stunning animation, the frank nature in which it explores Miyazaki’s self-reflective musings on memory makes it as much a conversation with the man in the mirror as it is the audience.

The question the film’s Japanese title poses lingers throughout the experience. How do you live? On the shoulders of those who came before you. After decades of defining the animation industry in Japan, Miyazaki has accepted his fate. This is ultimately a story about the hows and whys that define our memory, a recognition that no existence can live without building upon the inventions, experiences, and memories of those who came before us. A recognition that to move forward means to move on and let go of the past while keeping their memories and lessons close for the next person to carry that torch.

The Boy and the Heron feels like a recognition by Miyazaki of his place as a relic in a modern animation industry that’s moved on without him. Studio Ghibli has firmly embedded itself within animation history and particularly Japanese culture, where movies like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service feel like rights of passage for Japanese children even before we discuss the park or museum or the copious merchandising. People who don’t watch anime or look down on animation as some childish toy likely still know and love at least one Ghibli film. Totoro was a character in Toy Story 3!

Yet it’s also been 10 years since Miyazaki released his last film and nine years since Ghibli’s final feature, When Marnie Was There. For all the media at one point seemed determined to anoint the so-called “next Miyazaki,” only the spiritual successor made up of former veterans of Ghibli, Studio Ponoc, ever attempted to directly emulate the distinct visual and narrative playbook of the famed studio. Mary and the Witch’s Flower released to moderate success in 2017, but notably, the first trailer for the studio’s new project The Imaginary premiered before this screening with a visual and thematic approach that serves as a distinct departure.

The anime landscape today is defined by a different director: Makoto Shinkai. Films like Five Centimeters Per Second, Your Name, and Suzume, with their intense post-processing over highly realistic environments telling stories about love and distance through the imagery of fantasy and science fiction, are nonetheless impressive but are very distinct from the works of Ghibli in their own, more modern style. In recent years, with the success of Shinkai’s works, the comparisons have stopped. You can’t be the next Miyazaki when you’ve already eclipsed the man you’re being compared to.

When it’s not Shinkai or one of his many imitators, recognizable franchises reign stronger than ever. Anime has always relied on adaptations of other mediums, but the shift from historically lower gross for such films as mere fan service to the blockbusters of today showcases a stark difference. Last year, One Piece Film RED grossed almost 20 billion yen in Japan, making it one of the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time and placing it above Howl’s Moving Castle and all but two of Miyazaki’s works. The First Slam Dunk has similarly been breaking records and topped the box office for eight consecutive weeks upon release. And let’s not forget the monster 2020 success of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, whose 40 billion yen domestic gross demolished Spirited Away’s record of the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan.

The point is, we don’t see films like this being made anymore, for better and for worse. There’s no glee or joy in discussing Miyazaki’s fading stardom. Indeed, with The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki has produced one of his best films to date, a mature metafictional tale in a friendlier facade about memory and moving on from the past while carrying their precious experiences on their shoulders.

Yet the industry has moved on. This film feels thematically and visually like a lost piece of mid-2000s Ghibli media resurfaced from a vault and thrown onto cinema screens. No less impressive, but a piece of the past carried on the shoulders of those who built it, tossed into the world more to remember what we lost than to build upon what we have today. You could argue there’s irony in making a film about letting go and moving forward when a director can’t follow through with his desire to walk away, but maybe that’s why this movie had to be made.

Honestly, so moved and impressed I was by this movie, I’d love for him to betray its message and come back, just one more time. The creative well underneath Miyazaki remains full, and I’m sure he could create another 10 films and still have new ideas to explore. We’ve barely scratched the surface of his bottomless talent.

In the movie’s first act, Mahito finds an old copy of How Do You Live?, the children’s book that inspired the film’s Japanese title. The title page is signed by his mother with a message of how much he’s grown. He breaks down in tears. The adventure which follows proves that she was right, and the book stays with him throughout, another memory passed down for him to bear.

Just as Mahito needs to accept the loss of his mother, leaving that cinema on Friday morning felt like closing the book on an era of animation history we’ll never get back. The items passed on to Mahito by the characters in this fantasy world are ways to remember his adventure and reconnection to his mother, just as we can always rewatch these films. And remember we must, as it’s only by passing these memories down that they can live on long after the people behind them are gone.

Miyazaki has accepted his time has come and gone, and this is his plea to be remembered by the next generation. With this understanding, everything from the film’s complex yet thematically resonant story to particularly its non-existent promotional campaign made sense. Releasing a film without a single trailer, screenshot, or even synopsis feels like career suicide, a sure chance a film will fail. It’s a strategy that could only succeed at the hands of a studio and director who earned respect like these two. In turn, this campaign is a final plea from Miyazaki to the public who admire him and his work.

Memories only outlive us by sharing them with others, ensuring they won’t be forgotten with our passing. Similarly, if we want this era of animation to be remembered for generations to come, the onus is on us as an audience to champion its voice and share it with others. Ghibli and Miyazaki already have their place in history. If The Boy and the Heron is to join it, we have to want to pass it on, hold it close, and carry it with us.

And, after all that, move forward.

The Boy and the Heron is in theaters on December 8th.

A normal person in a rural town has dreams of becoming a master. As they come of age and spring approaches, it’s time for them to begin their journey to chase that dream. After saying goodbye to their mother and hometown, adventure awaits. They open the front door and take their first steps into a world full of new experiences and things to uncover.

That’s right: it’s time to enter the workforce!

The Pokémon that existed when Game Freak and series creator Satoshi Tajiri kick-started a phenomenon in 1996, and the one that premiered its first live-action TV series in Japan with Pack Your Pocket With Adventure (Pocket ni Bouken o Tsumekonde, or PokéTsume for short) last month, are almost unrecognizable. Which makes sense when you go from creating a game in a home office to a franchise more lucrative than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Harry Potter, and Nintendo’s own Mario combined.

More than 25 years since the original game’s release, multiple generations of kids have become adults under the watchful eyes of Pikachu and friends, and the series has grown to encompass everything from anime and merchandise to card games and Hollywood blockbusters. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, with the growth in popularity of trading card games like Pokémon in a postpandemic world and the record-breaking sales of the recent generation of titles despite quality concerns, it only seems to get more popular by the year.

For a franchise to retain relevance for as long as Pokémon, it must evolve — and not just evolve but interweave its ideals into the fabric of daily life. Those early generations of kids need to pass on their love of Pokémon like how Disney animated classics often serve as a formative childhood introduction to film.

Perhaps nothing encapsulates Pokémon’s successful transformation from video game to a way of life quite like PokéTsume.

But what even is PokéTsume? Prior to the premiere of the series in Japan last month, there had only been one prior attempt at live-action storytelling within the world of Pokémon: 2019’s Detective Pikachu. Unlike Ryan Reynolds’ wisecracking gumshoe Pikachu, PokéTsume was the first Japanese live-action foray into Pokémon and doesn’t even take place within the universe of the games.

In this series, we follow Madoka Akagi, portrayed by popular Japanese idol Nanase Nishino of Nogizaka46, a recent graduate moving out of her childhood home to live in the city and follow her dream of becoming a creator with an upstart company called ADventure. She played Pokémon Red and Blue (Red and Green in Japan) when she was a kid but has long since grown distant from the franchise.

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Much of the opening episode of the series plays out as a nostalgic parallel between the trials of working life and the journey to become a Pokémon Master. The childhood friend who works for another company is your rival. The product presentation to an investment CEO with the company’s status on the line is a gym battle.

She rediscovers Pokémon in a box of items sent from her mother and begins to replay this formative adventure; there are clips of the game or shots where we see the joy on the faces of both child and adult Madoka from the dim glow of the Game Boy screen. Pokémon love even intertwines with the music scoring the series: a relaxing bar plays a slow jazz-infused rendition of the Pokémon Center theme, just like how a synth rendition of Pallet Town marks the start of Madoka’s journey.

As the show develops, the lessons from the game form the basis of a pseudo-episodic tale about Madoka’s life at the company. The struggle to connect with a new client is paralleled by the way pokémon won’t listen to you until you’ve proven your worth with gym badges. Learning and improving on the job is the experience that turns a flailing, floundering Magikarp into a job-leading Gyarados. And so on.

The show can come across a bit silly in places, and it struggles with communicating itself by making its Pokémon overlay at times difficult to take seriously. But there’s heart: there are plenty of touches that represent a series made with love, such as how characters have their own sprites integrated into the gameplay of Pokémon Red.

With PokéTsume, Pokémon isn’t just a virtual journey to become a champion. It’s a lesson we take with us into our daily lives long after our adventure is at an end. It’s an integration of the morals of the franchise into our daily lives that epitomizes a 15-year transformation of the Pokémon brand.

To understand this, we must first cast an eye back to 2006. During the preparation for the launch of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for the Nintendo DS, developer Game Freak found the series at a crossroads. Sales had been on a steady decline since the original release, with the Hoenn GBA games at the time holding the distinction as the worst-selling mainline titles in the series. The reality was that the original generation of players had graduated from playing Pokémon, and new generations simply weren’t interested. Something had to change.

In response, the company launched the Japan-only Pokémon Garden via the country’s online Yahoo! Kids portal, an interactive experience taking you on a live tour through the history of Pokémon, featuring mini-games and new information on the yet to be released Diamond and Pearl. Over 5 million unique users accessed Yahoo! Kids every month at this time, all within the series’ core target demographic. In the end, the project proved successful, with Diamond and Pearl selling one-third more copies than its predecessors Ruby and Sapphire before eventually eclipsing the lifetime sales of those titles.

Notably, at the time, it was one of the company’s biggest attempts at diversifying the brand since its initial launch. Following the initial multimedia blitz, and the introduction of a World Championships and competitive circuit for the video games and TCG, the series remained relatively static. At this point, Pokémon was yet to truly experiment with online distribution and promotion, nor had attempts been made to branch out beyond the series’ core audience and multimedia properties following the initial surge in popularity.

As such, Pokémon Garden was the first real attempt at expanding the core experience of Pokémon to other platforms and audiences. While it’s easy to mark 2016’s Pokémon Go as the key turning point for Pokémon in its appeal to older demographics — and it certainly was significant — the framework for this success was paved far earlier by experiments in diversifying what Pokémon could be, whether that be through experiences like Garden or the transformation of the anime to tell a greater array of stories within this ever-expanding universe.

For the first time, external partners were being brought in to expand the world of Pokémon beyond Ash Ketchum. OLM, long-term Pokémon animation studio since 1998, passed the baton to other studios with the production of a spinoff series: Pokémon Origins. While the studio did assist in production and animated the finale for the four-episode series, the rest of production was a collaborative effort led by Production I.G and Xebec, and proved to be a hit with audiences craving something new from the world of Pokémon.

This was just the beginning. Since then, no fewer than six unique web series have been produced by various external partners from around the world, each set in different regions within the world of Pokémon. The most recent of these, this summer’s Path to the Peak, was unique for taking place in the real world with a focus on the experience of competing in the TCG. Meanwhile, the upcoming Netflix series Pokémon Concierge is another unique addition to this ever-expanding animation portfolio, marking the franchise’s series debut in stop motion.

This is on top of a slew of one-off short films and music videos as well as a refocus of priorities for the long-running movie franchise. In 2017, the annual film franchise abandoned continuity with the TV anime in order to tell its own original stories without being confined by external events, allowing them to experiment with CG animation, remake the early episodes of the Pokémon TV series in movie form, and allow Wit Studio, animators on the original series Attack on Titan, to helm their own movie with 2018’s The Power of Us.

The company did more than simply introduce dynamism into an anime that had long since gone stale in the eyes of many. Greater efforts were made to integrate Pokémon into the lives of communities in Japan and further afield, both through relief efforts and merchandising campaigns that provided more than toys and light relief to an aging audience.

Following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku and Fukushima, The Pokémon Company joined many others in rushing to the aid of those affected. These efforts led to the establishment of the Pokémon With You Foundation, aiming to provide support for disadvantaged communities even beyond this initial tragedy, expanding to everything from providing free educational materials and food drives for struggling children to funding scholarships. This was soon followed by partnerships with local governments across Japan for tourism initiatives, seen everywhere from Yokohama’s yearly Pikachu Outbreak to the Pokémon Local Acts initiative, which loans pokémon out to flog local delicacies and hotspots, while serving as the origin of the country’s charming Pokémon-themed manhole covers.

This diversification naturally included merchandising. Many of the 10-year-olds who played the initial games were now adults with families of their own. This led to the launch of monpoke, a special line of Pokémon-themed items for infants, as well as the now-discontinued Pokémon Shirts, which sold button-up shirts and formal workwear based on various pokémon.

With each of these efforts, alongside the launch of Pokémon Go — which gave lapsed older audiences an accessible reentry point that could fit around their busy schedules — the franchise was suddenly less of a gaming curio and more an ingrained facet of modern life.

By the time the 2023 Pokémon World Championships rolled around, the first to be held in Japan in Yokohama, the aforementioned Pikachu Outbreaks were transformed into a city-wide takeover. Beyond the competition and Pikachu marches were drone shows, pop-up Pokémon Centers, an orchestral concert, an entire cruise ship transformed into the SS Anne, food collaborations, photo spots, station takeovers, and more. Yokohama felt less like a typical Japanese city and more like a location ripped directly from the world of Pokémon itself. Within all that were families, often two or three generations, sharing in a mutual love of Pokémon.

The results speak for themselves. In recent years The Pokémon Company has recorded record profits and revenue, while the games, anime, and TCG are more popular than ever, with both new mainline Switch entries selling over 20 million copies. The phenomenon of growing out of Pokémon is no longer a concern. Even if young kids stop playing the video games as they grow, that doesn’t mean they won’t still engage with this world via other means. Nor does it mean they won’t introduce their own children to the series in the future.

PokéTsume is a series that’s only possible because of a reinvention of what Pokémon can be. While, in reality, it’s a mostly light, inoffensive promotional tool to sell games (it’s no coincidence the second episode has a scene of a young kid playing the latest entries in the series on his Nintendo Switch), it represents everything the franchise has aimed to be in recent years. Rather than a series for children, Pokémon now promises something for everyone. And those new adults seeking direction in life might find a fellow directionless 20-something employee more relatable than a kid wanting to be a Pokémon Champion. Frankly, it’s a way to see they aren’t alone, no different from how your party of pokémon kept you company through the deepest caverns of Mt. Moon.

It’s not unusual for the stories that defined you in your formative years to stick with you long into adulthood, providing the moral framework and life lessons you need in times of strife. What’s wrong with taking a bit of guidance in finding a way to exist within it? We all live in a Pokémon world. PokéTsume just puts that feeling on-screen.