Film · 2023 · Films · 2020s
The Boy and the Heron
Scored from 336 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
In wartime Japan, a grieving boy named Mahito moves to the countryside with his father and new stepmother after losing his mother in a Tokyo fire. Lured by a mysterious talking grey heron into an abandoned tower, he ventures into a fantastical parallel world to search for his missing stepmother and confront his grief.
Released in 2023, The Boy and the Heron is an adventure, animation and drama film.
The calibrated figure is built from 336 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 368 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 381 of whom clear the calibration test.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Boy and the Heron lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2020s (7,930 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 336.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
