‘The Boy and the Heron’ Is a Late-Career Masterpiece from Hayao Miyazaki
John Maescher ‘27 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
When Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film The Boy and the Heron was first announced, it was touted as the final film from the legendary 82-year-old Japanese animator. Miyazaki had already been retired for a decade after his 2013 masterpiece The Wind Rises, and the narrative was that he had come out of retirement for one last go-around. However, after the film’s North American festival premiere in September, Studio Ghibli announced that The Boy and the Heron would in fact not be Miyazaki’s final film and that the filmmaker had been coming into the studio offices with more ideas for the future. This dichotomy ultimately feels fitting for The Boy and the Heron, a beautiful work that simultaneously feels like an ending and a beginning, a departure and an arrival, a cumulative statement and an announcement of something new. It is a film that Miyazaki could only have made at this late stage in his career, elegiac but also yearning for greater horizons in ways he never quite has been before. It’s a deeply moving, personal, self-reflexive masterwork that feels extraordinarily hard to write about. In many ways, it feels like a miracle of a film.
In 1944 Tokyo during World War II, a teenage boy named Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki) loses his mother in a hospital bombing. Mahito and his father relocate to the countryside to live with Mahito’s new stepmother, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother. Mahito is haunted by grief and visions of his mother’s death as he wanders around his gorgeous, serene new home. A mysterious gray heron begins repeatedly visiting Mahito, cryptically telling him “Your presence is requested.” The heron claims Mahito’s mother isn’t actually dead, and that he can lead Mahito to her. Mahito follows the heron into a mysterious tower on the property, and what unfolds from there is a lot to unpack. Leading up to the film’s Japan release in July, Studio Ghibli notably refused to release any promotional images from The Boy and the Heron, relying solely on Miyazaki’s name recognition to drive audiences to the film (a gamble that proved successful). Although it’s impossible to avoid certain details in a review like this, the less known about the film beforehand, the more rewarding the experience is.
Much of The Boy and the Heron feels like classic Miyazaki; there’s the lonely child whisked away into a fantastical world, as well as the array of adorable creatures that pepper their journey. There’s the typically gorgeous and painterly animation, which almost feels redundant to single out given how much we’ve come to expect it from Miyazaki, but still goes so far and beyond everything else in the world of animation that it warrants a mention. Yet for as much familiar territory as there is, The Boy and the Heron simultaneously feels like something completely new. This is certainly not Miyazaki’s first time getting personal in his films, but here he reaches deeper into his roots than he ever has before; Miyazaki and his family fled war-torn Tokyo for the countryside in the same year of 1944 when he was just three years old, and he’s spoken several times about how his earliest memories were defined by war and fear. The Boy and the Heron sees Miyazaki reflecting on life in his twilight years, fully aware of the time he has left and using it to pack the screen with every ambitious idea and image he could think of. This is a beautiful meditation on death and the afterlife, where death is simply a new beginning, a transition into something new.
Miyazaki has never been one to abide by the tenets of reality, but this is his most enigmatic work yet, adhering much closer to emotional logic than narrative logic. It’s messier and more unwieldy than anything else he’s made, but that’s precisely where its wonders lie. Every frame and every turn of Mahito’s journey is overflowing with beauty and imagination. Miyazaki is painting on the largest and most sweeping canvas possible, and much of it may be confounding and mystifying at first glance, but going along for the ride makes for an immensely rich and moving experience. A key thing to consider is the film’s original Japanese title, How Do You Live?, which derives from Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 coming-of-age novel, a copy of which appears in the film as a gift to Mahito from his late mother. Miyazaki is asking the question “How do you live?” not only to Mahito, but to the audience. How do we live with our trauma and grief? How do we stay strong and find stability in the chaos life throws at us? The Boy and the Heron doesn’t give us direct answers to these questions; rather, it lets us find our own. Leave it to Miyazaki to tie things together in the most emotionally satisfying way he can, with a final image of profound beauty and simplicity. What a gift it is to have this film.
The Boy and the Heron opens in wide release on December 8th, including IMAX theaters.