If you want to see Hayao Miyazaki’s latest masterpiece in English before the masses, you’ll just need a plane ticket and a few hundred dollars.
“The Boy and the Heron,” which premiered in Japan on July 14, is about a boy who goes on a fantastical quest to find his missing stepmother and meets a talking heron on the way. Widely believed to be the acclaimed animator’s last feature film, the movie will make its international debut on the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7.
At time of writing, pairs of tickets are reselling for a minimum of 248.71 Canadian dollars (about ¥27,000) and as much as CA$416.50 (¥45,000). The festival officially sells tickets for individual films in the range of CA$26 to CA$88, but resales are hitting exorbitantly high prices. (What is likely the doings of scalpers is not exclusive to “The Boy and the Heron”: One ticket for the Bollywood sex comedy “Thank You for Coming” is selling for CA$238 at the time of writing, and a pair of tickets for “Sly,” a documentary about Sylvester Stallone, is selling for CA$286.)