Miyazaki spent years making a film about grief he couldn't explain, and you feel that uncertainty in every frame. The heron arrives to pull Mahito toward answers, but the movie knows the real answer is the journey itself, not the destination. The animation moves like memory, precise, beautiful, occasionally illogical, because that's how the mind actually works when it's trying to hold onto someone who's gone.

Mahito has lost his mother in a hospital fire during the war. Soon after, his father marries Natsuko, his late mother's younger sister, who looks strikingly like her, and the family leaves Tokyo for his mother's old rural home. There a persistent gray heron begins to taunt the boy and calls him the "long-awaited one". Mahito struggles with his grief and with an unfamiliar life, and he is shocked to learn that Natsuko is expecting a child. Then the heron speaks, insisting that his mother is still alive and that he can save her if he follows it into a mysterious tower near the house. Mahito resists at first, but when Natsuko vanishes into the tower, he goes after her. What follows is a descent into a strange world beneath his own, where life and death seem bound together, and where Mahito must come to understand what it means to live if he hopes to find his way home.