The last time Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of legendary Japanese animation outfit Studio Ghibli, made a film, it was a decade ago. 2013’s The Wind Rises, a fictionalised biography of the Mitsubishi A5M aircraft designer, was meant to be Miyazaki’s swansong having announced his retirement. But now, aged 82, he’s back with The Boy And The Heron, a new animation certain to delight fans of earlier films such as Howl’s Moving Castle and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away.
It might even be that Miyazaki would prefer this film not to be reviewed at all and for audiences to discover it for themselves. When it was released in Japan earlier this year, Studio Ghibli took the unusual decision to open the movie without trailers, images, synopsis or casting announcements; just a single enigmatic-looking poster to tease viewers. Such tactics worked, with the film enjoying the biggest ever opening weekend at the box office in Japan for a Studio Ghibli movie, grossing 1.83 billion yen (around £9.7m).

Originally, The Boy And The Heron was inspired by a book, Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live?, although Miyazaki has taken this in a very different direction. It begins in Tokyo during World War II when the Japanese city faced fierce bombing. A young boy, Mahito (voiced in the original Japanese-language version by Soma Santoki) loses his mother in a fire. Grief-stricken, he must later contend with the fact that his father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura) remarries his late wife’s younger sister Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), and moves them out to the countryside. 
The family relocates into an estate populated by chattering old maids, who like nothing better than smoking and gossiping. Mahito also encounters a large bird that patrols the grounds. ‘What are you?’ he asks. ‘Not an ordinary grey heron?’ This proves to be rather perceptive: he soon discovers that this feathered beast is a goblin-like creature disguised as a bird. Moreover, the heron claims that Mahito’s mother is still alive and that he can lead him to her. ‘She is waiting your rescue.’
So begins an increasingly strange dip into Miyazaki’s vivid imagination. When Mahito follows the grey heron, he plunges into a fantasy land populated by flocks of pelicans and armies of man-eating parakeets. There are also curious white puffy creatures called Warawara, which inflate and float to earth ‘to be born’ as humans. Mahito (which means ‘sincere one’) is the Dante figure, taken through the circles of this universe by his Virgil-like guide Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki), a seafaring woman with a spirit of adventure.

While Mahito’s stepmother Natsuko also disappears, adding to the film’s layers, Miyazaki’s magical mystery tour centres around a strange giant power-wielding stone, formed by a meteorite, and a tower that’s been built around it. The story goes that the tower was built by Natsuko’s great-uncle (Shōhei Hino), who was said to have read too many books and gone mad.
Of course, he will play a crucial role in Mahito’s journey, one that gets stranger by the second as characters in this underworld begin to resemble those on the surface. However off-kilter The Boy And The Heron can be (and sometimes it is quite baffling), it’s anchored with an emotional currency. Indeed, for what might well be Miyazaki’s last film, it’s surely his most personal. Like the characters here, his family relocated after the bombing of Tokyo, and he’s talked before about a strong attachment to his mother. At one point a character mutters, ‘I have grown old’, which feels as if it’s come from the ageing Miyazaki himself.

Aesthetically, the film is a thing of beauty, from Joe Hisaishi’s melodic score to the lush animation. Whether it’s the horrifying fires that open the film, or the tranquil countryside where Mahito’s family mansion is, the artwork is simply stunning. As for the voice cast, the English-dubbed version (available to UK viewers, as is the original) includes Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. But however you choose to watch it, this latest Miyazaki masterpiece will leave you enchanted. And its message, to ‘create a world of bounty, peace and beauty’, is one for the ages.
The Boy And The Heron is in cinemas from Tuesday 26 December.