Yesterday we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company. But if there’s another name that means almost as much as Disney in the world of animation, it’s Miyazaki. Hayao Miyazaki has surpassed even Disney among some fans of animation. His brand new film The Boy and the Heron (the legendary director’s first in a decade) is sure to be a big deal when it hits theaters in December. The movie’s English voice cast has now been revealed and it’s absolutely stacked, including a two former Batman and a Black Widow.
The full English voice cast for The Boy and the Heron has been announced and THR reports that it includes numerous A-list names, including Christian Bale, Robert Pattinson, Florence Pugh, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Davie Bautista, Mark Hamill, and Dan Stevens. It’s an incredible list of performers and shows just how profile this movie is.
Young actor Luca Padovan will voice the main character Mahito Maki, and Pattinson will voice the Grey Heron. The film tells the story of a young boy whose mother dies in 1940s Japan. But when the mysterious Grey Heron tells him that his mother is still alive, and inside a magical world, the boy crosses over.
The director of such popular anime films as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki had announced his retirement back in 2013. He made an animated short a few years later, but we thought we had seen his final feature. This makes The Boy and the Heron all the more highly anticipated as it will likely be the final feature from the 82-year-old auteur.
The best Hayao Miyazaki movie is going to be a topic of endless debate, but anybody who knows Miyazaki's work knows he has one of the most prolific, and successful catalogs of films of any director in Japan-- in animation or otherwise.
The movie was released in Japan in July and it broke box office records and already has received a massive outpouring of positive response from critics who have seen the Japanese version. So it seems likely that the film will be worth the wait for fans. The Boy and the Heron has been in production for years but was moving at a slow pace even before the global pandemic delayed things even further. The movie is entirely hand-drawn, yet another reason that the film has taken its time to get here.
If you’re a Miyazaki fan but one that comes from the “subs not dubs” school of viewing anime, you’re still in luck, as The Boy and the Heron release date of December 8 is a dual release . It will be available in theaters in both English and Japanese, so fans who want to experience the film in its truly original version can do so, but the movie will still be made more accessible to fans through the well-known voice cast.
