The Boy and The Heron Is a Masterful Close to Hayao Miyazaki’s Career: Review
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The post The Boy and The Heron Is a Masterful Close to Hayao Miyazaki’s Career: Review appeared first on Consequence.
This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 New York Film Festival.
The Pitch: An air raid siren blares; smoke fills the night sky. It’s World War II-era Japan, and a bombing of a hospital in Tokyo has left young Mahito (Soma Santoki) without a mother. A year later, he moves to a rural village with his stern father (Takuya Kimura), who manages a factory building planes for the war effort. Mahito’s grief still burns bright, stoked by his father’s marriage to his mother’s younger sister, Natsuko, and the impending arrival of a new sibling. He’s lonely, out of place among all the trees and the bevy of old ladies who flock around the village.
Mahito is also harassed by a blue-grey heron, whose croaks and groans slowly start to take the form of human speech. Before long, his life takes a turn for the supernatural, as a quest to find his missing stepmother leads him (and the bothersome heron) into a fantastical realm hidden inside a tower erected by his mysterious great-great-uncle…. where the heron claims Mahito’s long-lost mother still lives.
The Wind Rises… Again: It’s been a decade since animation auteur Hayao Miyazaki directed a film (his last was 2013’s The Wind Rises, another comparatively muted drama set amid the violence of WWII). While his studio, Studio Ghibli, has dutifully produced many films since his last, they never quite captured the ineffable magic that seems to surround his works. And so, the master returns to his field, building another fantastical expanse of hand-drawn animation and deeply felt characters that hum at the frequency of a fairytale.
The Miyazaki faithful will recognize many of the rhythms of his works in The Boy and the Heron: Like Spirited Away, a young child searches for their parent(s) in a mesmerizing world that threatens to swallow them whole. The verdant serenity of nature threatened by man’s insatiable greed, our aching need for connection — it’s all here in Mahito’s relatable journey. He’s a boy lashing out at the world for taking his mother away from him, all while running from the myriad pressures he faces.
It’s a classic coming-of-age story, colored with all of Miyazaki’s gentle strokes of the pen and highly detailed sense of architecture (the film ushers us from the thatched-roof cottages of the Japanese countryside to sparse no-places that evoke the paintings of De Chirico).
Stairway to Heron: Unlike many of the master’s most popular works, like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, The Boy and the Heron takes its time to fully immerse its character in the dreamlike reality and stylized creatures of its fantastical world. Its first half plays out more like something from Ozu, a slice-of-life tale where a boy grieves, pushes people away, and hurts himself just to feel something. Joe Hisaishi delivers another beautiful, plaintive score filled with lonely pianos that give way to sweeping strings.
The Boy and the Heron (GKIDS)
But soon as Mahito and the heron (whose rivalry with Mahito reveals himself to be a short, stout man living inside said bird) sink into the mysteries of his great-great-uncle’s book-lined tower in the latter half, Miyazaki’s imagination takes flight.
It’s a lot to take in at first viewing — new characters seem to be time-displaced versions of older ones we’ve seen previously, war brews within the population of giant parakeets who live in the tower, and souls (who take the form of cutesy marshmallow-like sprites called “warawara”) float up to the sky to be born. It can be more than a bit disorienting, as Mahito’s journey takes him from one dynamic to another with little explanation. But such is the logic of dreams — Miyazaki’s more concerned with emotional reality than sitting you down and explaining the lore.
How Do You Live? The Boy and the Heron is directly inspired by the 1937 novel How Do You Live?, which is also the title’s direct translation in Japan. Its fingerprints are all over this story, one both reflective of Miyazaki’s inspirations and Miyazaki himself — who, too, was the son of a man who built warplanes for Japan during the role, much like the protagonist of The Wind Rises.
The Boy and the Heron (GKIDS)
The book’s author, Genzaburo Yoshino, argues in his coming-of-age story for the deep need for feeling and humanism in the face of authoritarian order. Fitting, then, that Mahito rejects the rigid uniforms and hierarchical structures of his rural school to embrace the tower’s madcap structures and deep connection to nature. It’s a deeply feeling film shaped by grief, anger, and loss and the understanding that all are necessary evils that shape the human experience.
The Verdict: Who knows if The Boy and the Heron is truly Miyazaki’s final film? The 82-year-old has said as much before, and some inexorable artistic yearning keeps pulling him back to the pen. If this film is Miyazaki’s true bow, it’s a magnificent final flourish that folds together many of the thematic and aesthetic threads he’s explored through his career: man’s relationship to nature, the majesty of flight, the twin pulls of love and loss. It’s stunning and inscrutable and measures among the best of his works.
Where’s It Playing? The Boy and the Heron screens at the upcoming New York Film Festival and will be released in the US on December 8th.
Trailer:
The Boy and The Heron Is a Masterful Close to Hayao Miyazaki’s Career: Review
Clint Worthington
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