In Genzaburō Yoshino’s 1937 novel, How Do You Live?, there is a quote that’s striking in what often comes to mind when thinking of the vastness of the universe, in comparison to our humble existences: “On a night like this, to think about the distant celestial world was to feel that one was disappearing into the atmosphere.”

This quote, as well as the overall themes of the book, sets a course for Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, which became available in theaters internationally this past Friday. In the year following his mother’s untimely death, a young boy, Mahito, struggles with not only the new town he and his father move to, but also in accepting his aunt, Natsuko, as a mother figure. Upon encounter with a talking heron, he travels into a world contained within a nearby abandoned building, in search of his mother and a missing Natsuko.

It’s been ten years since the release of Miyazaki’s previous directorial effort, The Wind Rises. Within that time, the worlds created in his films – ranging from My Neighbor Totoro to the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away – have become much more recognizable in Western culture; so much to where there’s so much merch for his films that can be found from the likes of BoxLunch and RockLove Jewelry. Whether it be because of nostalgia for the films that generations like mine — the Ghibli Generation, if you will — grew up with, or just our culture’s overall openness to entertainment from East Asia in recent years, Miyazaki’s work has reached a status akin to Disney at this point.

Perhaps it’s because of his prominence now that it seemed well timed to tell both his most personal, and his most experimental, film to date. The latter description may be an odd choice to use for a director who has brought some of the most imaginative worlds and animation to the screen (and The Boy and the Heron is definitely no exception to that), but it’s a description that still feels just as fitting for a film that, much like its inspiration, is more thematically driven than plot driven, poses more questions than answers, and challenges both the protagonist, and the audience, along the way. Longtime viewers of Miyazaki’s works may consciously take such instances for what they are, but subconsciously, there’s definitely a lot more to digest with this one.

In all its thoughtful discourse that further deepens what we’ve become accustomed to from Miyazaki, it’s the unaccustomed decisions in the story that surprised me, and not exactly in a good way. In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito is set on the path of rescuing quite a few women from this mysterious world: his mother and his aunt, respectively. It’s indicated that their physical resemblances are similar enough to where he’s taken aback when he’s first greeted by Natsuko, and in time, it feels as if they almost become one and the same. Seeing his father with her, understandably, irks Mahito, and to see her, for most of the film, basically helpless while pregnant, makes the first scenes of her seem like an entirely different person.

Miyazaki has a reputation for writing, and often centering, several of his films on headstrong female characters. While that’s not to say there weren’t any in this film whatsoever, how he went about writing the women, for the most part, feels like a step back for him. Even one of the maids, Kiriko, who’s initially made out to be a reluctant tagalong on Mahito’s adventure, winds up not having much of a role at all – or at least, not in the way that may have been expected otherwise.

It’s a bothersome detail in The Boy and the Heron, but it doesn’t completely distract from the overall strong execution. Miyazaki is well aware that he is in his twilight years, which would explain why this is his most personal film to date. At the same time, whether intentional or not, it feels like this film was written as not just an outpouring of feelings and experiences he has long since kept dormant, but also as a letter to the Ghibli Generation.

Mahito is growing up without his mother, in a new environment, during World War II. Life has not been kind to him, so much to where there’s even a scene where he self-harms. For those who grew up post-9/11, exposed to wars and violence of sadistic proportions, and are now dealing with fascist political leaders, climate change, repercussions of the pandemic, and mental health issues, he’s conscious of the burdens we are inheriting, yet still strives to ask ourselves a question that best sums up this film, the novel that inspired it, as well as so many of his other works: How do you live?

As we look to succeed where our predecessors failed, perhaps The Boy and the Heron can aid in us navigating the answer(s) to the question in due time. On nights where we aren’t disappearing into the atmosphere when thinking of distant celestial worlds, time can be better spent in the here and now, for better and for worse.