Hayao Miyazaki’s final film The Boy and the Heron (formerly known as How Do You Live?) will open the prestigious Toronto Intl. Film Festival on September 7. This marks the first time an animated feature has opened the influential fall film event.
Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron opened in theaters in Japan on July 14. Although the movie was released without any marketing, trailer or any images beyond the enigmatic poster image of a boy wearing a bird mask, it has been performing remarkably well in Japan. To date, the well-reviewed movie has grossed about $26 million in Japan (over 3.6 billion yen) since its debut in Japan on July 14. It made over $13.2 million (1.83 billion yen) in its opening weekend, becoming the biggest opening in Ghibli history and surpassing Howl’s Moving Castle’s 1.48 billion yet opening in 2004. The film also made over $1.7 million from 44 IMAX screens, setting a new three-day record.
“We are honored to open the 48th Toronto International Film Festival with the work of one of cinema’s greatest artists. Already acclaimed as a masterpiece in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki’s new film begins as a simple story of loss and love and rises to a staggering work of imagination,” Cameron Bailey, CEO of TIFF, said on Thursday.
Titled after the 1937 novel by Yoshino Genzaburo, How Do You Live / The Boy and the Heron takes a fanciful departure from that introspective coming-of-age piece. The movie centers on a boy named Mahito whose mother is killed in the WWII fire bombings of Tokyo. Moving out of the city and struggling to adjust to his grief, a new stepmother (his mother’s sister) and a half-sibling on the way, Mahito is lured by a talking heron into a fantastical journey through an alternate world to rescue what he has lost.
GKIDS will release the acclaimed new movie in U.S. theaters later this year.
