The Boy and the Heron Will Poop on Max
Prepare for parakeet poo, because this year’s newly crowned Best Animated Feature is heading to streaming. The Boy and the Heron, the box-office-smashing anime film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, will follow its Studio Ghibli forebears to Max later this year. The Japanese film may be a latecomer to the major awards-season films available to stream, but is a welcome addition; the acclaimed director’s film is partly autobiographical, informed by his and his family’s experiences witnessing the horrors of World War II.
We still don’t have an exact date for when in 2024 The Boy and the Heron will hit the service, but the move to Max is somewhat expected. All the other Studio Ghibli films, which are distributed in the U.S. by indie shop GKIDS, have called it their streaming home since the app’s launch as HBO Max in 2020. In the the years since they’ve remained on the service despite parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s merger, the relaunch into Max, and the ensuing content purges the company brought to its flagship streamer. News of The Boy and the Heron’s streaming status came as part of a multiyear extension of WBD and GKIDS’s licensing agreement, so all of the Ghibli films should remain on the service for the foreseeable future. That gives you plenty of time to savor Robert Pattinson’s gravelly tones as the titular heron once it alights on Max.
Related