Movies like The Boy and the Heron

Why it's similar — The Studio Ponoc anthology — directed by ex-Ghibli artists Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Yoshiyuki Momose, and Akihiko Yamashita — is the closest formal sibling to The Boy and the Heron, sharing the careful, painterly background-art language and the willingness to follow a child's emotional logic into something semi-fabulous. Yonebayashi's segment in particular shares the underwater-light register of Mahito's tower world.

Why it's similar — Tomotaka Shibayama's 2024 anime film shares The Boy and the Heron's project of letting an unhappy boy meet a creature from a parallel folk-Japan and find his grief reorganised through the encounter. The summer-light palette and the everyday-fantasy register Ghibli built are visibly the parent grammar this film is working in.

Why it's similar — Hiromasa Yonebayashi's 2014 Ghibli film centres on a withdrawn child sent to the countryside who meets a mysterious girl in an abandoned building — and resolves into a revelation about family that is the structural rhyme for what Miyazaki does with Mahito and Himi. The same emotional engine, ten years earlier, with a softer landing.

Why it's similar — Hiroyasu Ishida's Studio Colorido feature sends a group of children adrift on a building that has crossed into a fantastical sea and asks them to grieve a parent and a place at the same time. The maritime fantasy and the bereavement-as-engine premise are both directly comparable to Mahito's tower-world ocean and the loss of his mother.

Why it's similar — Keiichi Hara's 2019 fantasy follows a girl into a parallel world via a portal in an antique shop and trusts the audience to follow a meandering, room-by-room logic the way Miyazaki trusts his audience to follow the heron into the tower. The pacing is unhurried, the production design is painterly, and the political subtext is similarly buried.