The Boy and the Heron

君たちはどう生きるか

Mahito Maki, a twelve-year-old boy in wartime Japan, loses his mother to a hospital fire and relocates with his father Shoichi to a rural estate, where his father has married Natsuko — his late mother's younger sister. An enigmatic gray heron begins visiting Mahito with promises about his mother, and when Natsuko vanishes into an ancient tower on the estate grounds, Mahito follows the bird inside and enters a realm where the living and the dead share the same space.