The Boy and the Heron is supposedly the final film from Hayao Miyazaki, a man who has come out of retirement more times than Rocky Balboa.

Set during World War II, the feathery fantasy sees Mahito (Soma Santoki) evacuated to the Japanese countryside following the death of his mother. There he encounters what appears to be a pesky Heron (Masaki Suda) – but this being Studio Ghibli, nothing is as it seems. Soon Mahito is whisked into an avian flu-dream, where the heron tells the boy his mother is alive in wonderland.

The unfolding vision harks back to Miyazaki’s classics, the self-referential creatures echoing those who populate Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. But where Spirited Away threw Chihiro headfirst into dreamland without giving her much purpose, this starts by establishing Mahito’s motivations before going cuckoo. And though it lacks the magical singularity of the 2001 picture, it is more story-driven and also features giant man-eating parakeets. So it’s wings and roundabouts.

Miyazaki returns to his usual themes (nature and flight, childhood displacement, the fluidity of reality), but no two trips are ever the same. His psychedelic swansong finds him looking back as well as to the horizon; when Mahito is asked to inherit the world he has conjured, the 82-year-old director contends with relinquishing his life’s work. Again, we’ve heard that one before. But if this is Miyazaki’s final flight, it is a treat to take one last journey through the doorways of his imagination.

There are few directors who invite us to dream with such compassion and conviction. His worlds are ever-changing ecosystems where characters can escape and process grief, war and every trauma under the sun; where good and evil do not exist as binary concepts, but where imposing monsters inevitably end up comically deflated (then reluctantly carted around by an overly hospitable protagonist).

The Boy and the Heron has all this and a side of fish guts – and while it may not scale the heights of the freshest Ghibli flicks, it is a strange pleasure to watch it soar.