This story originally ran March 12 and has been updated several times with news on The Boy and the Heron’s home releases.
Prepare for parakeet poo, because this year’s Best Animated Feature is now on streaming. The Boy and the Heron, the box-office-smashing anime film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, has followed its Studio Ghibli forebears to hit on Max in the United States today, September 6. The Japanese movie had already been available on physical media and digital platforms via GKIDS for several months, but it’s a latecomer compared to last year’s major awards-season contenders available on streaming. The acclaimed director’s film is partly autobiographical, informed by his and his family’s experiences witnessing the horrors of World War II.
The move to Max — which was announced March 12, two days after it won the Oscar — was expected. All the other Studio Ghibli films, which are distributed in the U.S. by indie shop GKIDS, have called it their streaming home since the app’s launch as HBO Max in 2020. In the years since, they’ve remained on the service despite parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s merger, the relaunch into Max, and the ensuing content purges the company brought to its flagship streamer. News of The Boy and the Heron’s streaming status came as part of a multiyear extension of WBD and GKIDS’s licensing agreement in March, so all of the Ghibli films should remain on the service for the foreseeable future.
Outside the U.S. and Japan, Netflix will be the go-to streamer for the film, as it has been for other Ghibli titles. The service announced March 21 that GKIDS, Ghibli, and the distributor Goodfellas extended Netflix’s global distribution deal in the wake of The Boy and the Heron’s success. (Internationally, Netflix has carried the Ghibli titles since 2020.) Like Max, Netflix initially declined to give an exact streaming date. The streaming release took a while given that The Boy and the Heron hit U.S. theaters widely in December, but the schedule was delayed by the fact that the film staggered its theatrical releases in major markets like India and China — release windows that typically run ahead of streaming. But for those of us who want to savor Robert Pattinson’s gravelly tones as the titular heron on streaming, the wait is almost up.