It’s been months since Hayao Miyazaki’s latest (and maybe final? or maybe not!) anime movie, The Boy and the Heron, debuted in Japan, and fans of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli from other countries, where the film has been making the festival rounds, have eagerly been waiting for their chance to see it. Ahead of the movie’s December release in U.S. theaters, promotion has been rolling out slowly: First, with the movie’s initial Japanese-language teaser trailer, then the announcement of the voice cast for the English dub, and now the first English-language trailer, featuring the voices of Robert Pattinson, Dave Bautista, Florence Pugh, and others.
Chief among the group is Robert Pattinson, doing a voice far off from his surly Batman growl in the title role as the grey heron. The Boy and the Heron — referred to in Japan as How Do You Live? after the Japanese children’s literature classic it references — follows a boy into a strange, surreal fantasy world after his mother dies. A cranky, smug, deceitful heron offers to serve as his guide, but it’s clear it has its own agenda, and its own amusements.
The new trailer includes snippets of Bautista as The Parakeet King and Pugh as the supporting character Kiriko, plus other voices that are harder to immediately identify, so fans and YouTube trailer reactors will probably be pulling this teaser apart to decode them all. The full cast includes Christian Bale, Gemma Chan, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Willem Dafoe, Mamoudou Athie, Dan Stevens, and Tony Revolori.
The Boy and the Heron will arrive in American theaters on Dec. 8.