10 Deceptively Innocent Movies With Incredibly Dark Moments
6. The Boy and the Heron
Returning for one final piece of cinema, legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron was released to critical acclaim in the summer of 2023. Prompted by a mysterious talking grey heron, the star-studded Studio Ghibli production follows the journey of Mahito Maki, a young boy who enters a magical world through a derelict tower near his new home.
This all sounds relatively benign in terms of stakes - The Boy and the Heron is allegedly an animated fantasy flick, after all - but featured amidst Miyazaki's mindbending narrative lie several elements that belie the movie's surface appearance as a children's film.
Between the appalling visual of Mahito losing his mother in a hospital fire in the picture's early goings, a disturbing instance of juvenile self-harm, and hordes of man-eating parakeets, The Boy and the Heron is shockingly sombre in patches. Emphasising the devastating impact of loss and grief through the lens of a child's perspective, Miyazaki's tale is inescapably soul-destroying at times. Despite what is ultimately a soulful and uplifting conclusion, it's legitimately difficult to shake the sense of despair associated with these previous flashpoints.
This is far from the stereotype that one would typically associate with a film centred on an animated talking bird.