Miyazaki’s First Movie in a Decade Is Mysterious, Startlingly Adult, and Completely Dazzling

When Hayao Miyazaki’s last feature film, The Wind Rises, was released 10 years ago, that movie, the fictionalized story of a real-life aviation pioneer whose designs were used by the Japanese military to deadly success, was hailed as an appropriately somber farewell for the then-73-year-old filmmaker. Miyazaki’s own company, the legendary animation house Studio Ghibli, announced the master’s retirement at the film’s premiere, in full awareness that similar vows had for years been made later to be rescinded; every film since Princess Mononoke in 1997 has been rumored, if not outright declared, to be the last to issue straight from Miyazaki’s fertile brain and pen.

But the imagination that generated such enduring characters as the benevolent forest spirit Totoro, the indomitable fish-turned-girl Ponyo, and the fear-conquering young heroines of movies like Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service is not an easy force to control. By 2016, Miyazaki was at work on another project, described by a studio spokesperson as his most autobiographical to date. The work advanced slowly thanks to the master’s insistence on using hand-drawn 2D animation for every frame (working with a team of about 60 co-illustrators), and was later delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The story of the new film also underwent a change in focus in 2018 when Miyazaki’s longtime friend and mentor Isao Takahata, the animator with whom he co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, died at the age of 82.

An homage to Takahata is visible in The Boy and the Heron’s far-from-kid-friendly opening sequence, as 12-year-old Mahito awakes to the sound of air-raid sirens. It’s 1943, and an Allied bombing has set the local hospital on fire with Mahito’s mother inside. While it wasn’t clear to me, at least from the English subtitles, whether his mother works at the hospital or is a patient there, the image of a mother stranded in a faraway institution is a recurring theme in Miyazaki’s filmography, one he has said is based on the childhood experience of his mother’s lingering but ultimately not fatal illness. In a terrifying scene reminiscent of Takahata’s World War II–set 1988 masterpiece The Grave of the Fireflies, the boy races through the burning streets of Tokyo—the old Tokyo of low-slung traditional houses and narrow streets, about to be changed forever by war—but by the time he reaches the hospital, the building has collapsed, killing his mother.

A year passes, and the fiercely private Mahito, still in deep mourning, is unwillingly relocated to the country with his father, an emotionally closed-off munitions manufacturer, and his new stepmother Natsuko, who is the younger sister of his lost mother. Though their new house in the woods has the isolated feel of a fairy-tale castle, Natsuko is far from an evil stepmother: She seeks a connection with her new charge and is anxious to make him feel like an older sibling to the baby she’s now carrying. But he regards her presence as an imposition and finds her solicitude overbearing. The school he enrolls at is also a disaster. After Mahito is bullied the first day, he responds with an act of startling self-destructiveness (young kids in the audience might struggle once again with the violence of this brief but haunting scene).

On Mahito’s lonely walks around the family property, he notices a gray heron that at times seems to be following him, and at others to be deliberately pestering him, perching outside his bedroom window issuing ungodly screeches before suddenly flying off. The bird is not exactly friendly, yet it seems intent on establishing contact with the boy. The reason for that will become clear soon enough, when the elegant waterfowl transforms into a far-from-elegant man-bird hybrid with a warty humanoid head that peers up disturbingly out of the bird’s throat, essentially wearing the open beak as a hoodie. It’s a tribute to this movie’s thoroughgoing commitment to unexplained dream logic that the guy-inside-a-bird-head creature comes to seem like an all but standard-issue sidekick after only a few scenes of his and Mahito’s adventures. Together they explore an abandoned tower on the property that once belonged to Mahito’s late great-uncle, a local eccentric and reputed sorcerer who was said to have gone mad after reading too many books.

What happens once the boy and the bird begin to unveil the secrets of that crumbling tower is best left for the reader to discover, not least because the writer is not sure she entirely understood it. It can at least be said that there are multiple discrete worlds, both physical and metaphysical, to be passed through before Mahito can accomplish what he has been sent to the tower to do. Among the life forms Mahito will encounter are adorable floating bubble-spirits known as the warawara, a young girl who joins the boy and the bird on their quest, and a marauding tribe of what are described briefly but accurately in my viewing notes as “fascist parrots.”

The stories that interweave in the movie’s long, dreamy middle section play out sometimes as political allegories (those goose-stepping parrots!) and sometimes as psychological riddles. Symbolic decisions in the tower-world, it’s suggested, could have dire material consequences back in Mahito’s everyday reality. But how to move back and forth between ordinary life and the magical shadow-world, and whether it’s worth the effort to learn to manage the boundary between those realms, become the problems the young hero must solve. It’s in its most dreamlike and least logical stretches (which are also, by no accident, its most dazzlingly animated, with a plangent piano-based score by Joe Hisaishi) that Miyazaki’s film feels most autobiographical. An inner life like his, densely packed as it is with imaginary critters and alternative worlds, must have been tough terrain to navigate as an early adolescent growing up in a time of war and violent upheaval. Though the film never sets itself up as an artist’s coming-of-age story—Mahito’s quest has to do with the need to get past his paralyzing grief, not with his self-invention as a future creator—The Boy and the Heron can’t help but feel like a work of introspection on the director’s part. It’s a film about finding both the courage to accept the often unbearable circumstances life places us in and the internal freedom to imagine other circumstances and other possible lives.

The Boy and the Heron may not have moved me emotionally as much as some of Miyazaki’s earlier classics, but it left me intellectually and aesthetically dazzled, and profoundly grateful for this late-life glimpse into the autobiography of one of film’s great living artists. And while I don’t predict that it will become a film I’ll want to watch again countless times, the way I have the much gentler My Neighbor Totoro, it may not be fair to measure every Miyazaki film against the one I once helped select as the first full-length movie my daughter would ever watch—and one that, for several years afterward, became almost the only one she wanted to see. (At age 17, she still places it among her all-time favorite films.)

The straightforward English-language title The Boy and the Heron suits this film’s yearning, contemplative tone far less than the original Japanese title, which translates as How Do You Live? That phrase was taken from the title of a 1937 novel for boys that Miyazaki recalls reading in his youth—a book that appears at one point in The Boy and the Heron, though the film’s storyline has nothing to do with the novel’s plot. In a New York Times interview from 2021, asked what his own answer was to the question of the title, Miyazaki replied, “I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.” For his entire career, going on six decades now, Miyazaki has been one of the few living filmmakers in any genre whose movies persistently leave the viewer asking that very question: Like venerable folk tales or fairy tales, they enchant us with fantastical visions while posing moral conundrums that are far from simple to solve. If Miyazaki has more movies in him left to make—a possibility that his fans should know by now never to rule out—it’s unlikely he will ever make one that couldn’t take its title from that unanswerable, endlessly tantalizing question.