Review: 'The Boy and the Heron' is Hayao Miyazaki at his most beautifully elegiac

The very last moment in "The Boy and the Heron" is the simplest, loveliest, most quietly shattering thing. It could hardly be otherwise, being the final scene of purportedly the final work from the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. I'm reluctant to say more, not just because the image itself defies description, as Miyazaki's art often does, or because I'm wary of spoilers, since his teeming, restlessly inventive stories have long been liberated from the prison of (yawn) narrative logic. Let's just say that this parting shot feels like an end and a beginning, a departure and a return, a reminder of all the imaginative wonders that can spring from the dimmest recesses of a boy's memory. He may be learning to put away childish things, but the movie around him embraces them without fear or apology.