The Boy and the Beast

A nine-year-old boy named Ren is left on his own in Tokyo's Shibuya district after losing his mother and refusing to live with distant relatives. Wandering the streets, he follows a strange figure into Jutengai, a parallel realm inhabited by beasts, and cannot find his way back. There he meets Kumatetsu, a bear-like warrior with a rough manner and no apprentice, who takes the boy on as his student. Ren, renamed Kyuta in that world, begins training in combat under Kumatetsu, and the two solitary characters gradually come to depend on each other. In time Kyuta returns to Tokyo to reckon with his origins, while a threat tied to the past endangers the city.

The film is Mamoru Hosoda's eighth feature and follows Wolf Children in his filmography; he wrote the screenplay, with Seiji Okuda, Takuya Ito and Genki Kawamura producing. Studio Chizu animated it for a Japanese release in July 2015. Koji Yakusho voices Kumatetsu, while Aoi Miyazaki and Shota Sometani voice Kyuta as a child and a teenager respectively; Suzu Hirose, Lily Franky and Yo Oizumi also appear in the voice cast. It runs 119 minutes.

The film took about 50 million dollars worldwide, a strong result for an original Japanese animated feature. On IMDb it holds 7.6 out of 10 from roughly 30,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.9 out of 10 from around 1,600 votes. A critics' rating of 7.3 out of 10 from 67 reviews places it close to, though slightly below, the audience scores.