2 months after its Japanese release, Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron gets its first trailer next week

The Boy and the Heron
(Image credit: Studio Ghibli/GKIDS)

The Boy and the Heron, the latest film from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, is about to get its very first trailer, nearly two months after its original Japanese release.

The film, released on July 14 in Japan, received almost no pre-release marketing. With no trailers and only a single poster promoting the movie's release, it still managed to achieve the biggest box office opening in Studio Ghibli's history on the back of little more than the reputation of the studio and writer-director Hayao Miyazaki.

GKIDS, the film's North American distributor, has announced that a teaser trailer for The Boy and the Heron will debut on September 6, just ahead of the film's global premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7. This won't just be the film's first English-language trailer - it'll be the first public release of any kind of footage from the movie in any territory.

For now, we've got a brief teaser made up of text and audio that serves as an "introduction" to the film. "A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning," the teaser says, describing the film as "a semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki."

After The Boy and the Heron makes the festival circuit, GKIDS says the film will get a theatrical release in North America this fall.

While we all await more on Miyazaki's latest, check out our full guide to all the biggest upcoming movies in 2023 and beyond.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.