Christian Bale, Gemma Chan, and more cast in English dub of Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron

Anime legend Hayao Miyazaki's latest film has been making the rounds at fall film festivals, but it will soon be playing for the public in U.S. theaters. Like most anime releases in recent years, The Boy and the Heron will be available to screen in both its original Japanese language (with English subtitles) and also in an English language dub.

On Tuesday, American distributor GKIDS announced the English dub's star-studded cast includes Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson, and Florence Pugh. Luca Padovan, who played the young neighbor boy Paco in season 1 of You, will voice protagonist Mahito Maki. Pattinson, for what it's worth, will voice the titular gray heron. Bale at least has experience with Miyazaki's movies, having voiced the titular wizard in the English dub of Howl's Moving Castle.

The Boy and the Heron hit Japanese theaters on July 14, with very minimal marketing aside from Miyazaki's hand-drawn teaser image of the heron. American viewers have gotten a few more teases, including a trailer and lots of stills — as well as a poster which you can see below.

From those, we can glean while Miyazaki's previous film, 2013's The Wind Rises, was a historical biopic of Japanese airplane engineer Jiro Horikoshi, The Boy and the Heron returns to the fantasy elements that fans of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli will recognize from past works like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Bautista, for instance, voices a character called the Parakeet King, while Tony Revolori and Dan Stevens voice other anthropomorphic parakeets.

The dub of The Boy and the Heron was made in accordance with the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)'s Foreign Dubbing Agreement, which is not currently under strike by the Hollywood actors' union. GKIDS is also an independent company not associated with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

Here's Studio Ghibli's official description of The Boy and the Heron, for those curious: "A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning. A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki."

The Boy and the Heron hits U.S. theaters on Dec. 8.

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