Image Source: GKIDS
In late October, I was lucky to attend a pre-release screening of The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in 10 years, as part of the Animation is Film Festival at The Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It was quite the experience. My mom, dad, several of his coworkers (animators and TV writers mostly), and I waited in a line that stretched up the theater stairs and around several corners before entering single file into a building decorated with ornate and potentially culturally-appropriated designs. Once inside, we looked around to find hundreds of people, all excitedly murmuring, and in front of them all, a massive 60 foot IMAX screen. We anxiously awaited the start of the film.
Hayao Miyazaki is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, and manga artist. He’s now 82, and has made at least 32 films since 1979. His resume includes world wide phenomena Totoro, Spirited Away, Porco Rosso Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, Castle in the Sky, Howl’s Moving Castle, and many more. He’s one of my favorite directors, and definitely my favorite animation director, so when I heard he was making a new movie, I was ecstatic to see what it would be like. As an animation executive and co-founder of the Animation Is Film festival said on the stage before the movie began, “We are lucky to be living in a time when Mozart is still composing.”
The Boy and The Heron begins with a five minute prologue of sorts, where we see how Mahito, a young boy living in early 1940s Japan, has lost his mother in a hospital fire in Tokyo. A year later, Mahito’s father, an air munitions factory owner, remarries his late wife’s younger sister, Natsuko. Mahito and his new family move out of the city to his mother’s (and Natsuko’s) childhood home. The landscape is reminiscent of the farmland from Totoro, but more heavily wooded, a setting familiar to Miyazaki and his fans–lush landscapes are where his movies shine. Quickly, we get more trademark Miyazaki quirky characters, this time in the form of little old ladies; they are sweet, curious, and hilariously obsessed with smoking. While I would have been content to watch them simply exist for hours, there was a little bit of a feeling that they checked boxes that were required, instead of playing organic roles. This is also true for the Warawara, cute white blobs that we meet later. I can imagine that it’s very difficult for Studio Ghibli to walk the line between creating purely original, weird, fun characters, and trying to recreate the mass appeal of Totoro or The Soot Sprites. In this case, I think they leaned too far into the latter. Fortunately, a character is quickly introduced who feels refreshingly unique. This is the titular heron (a large blue-grey waterbird), who makes itself known to Mahito several times in the first part of the movie. It isn’t your average heron, as we can see pretty clearly when it opens its mouth to reveal an alarming set of teeth and gums. It soon speaks to Mahito and leads him to an ancient tower, and subsequently into another world, kicking off the story.
The rest of the movie sees Mahito exploring the new world—searching for Natsuko, who’s gone missing—which is filled with the spirits of the dead, vast oceans, and lots of talking birds. These include the heron, who seems to be the only one of his kind and who has a complicated relationship with Mahito, vicious swarms of pelicans searching for food, and equally hungry carnivorous parakeets, who organize by the thousands under a Parakeet King.
To be honest, the next hour and a half feel like an insane, rich dream—beautiful, but impossible to describe. There is plot, but it often feels very abstract, like a metaphor that needs to be deciphered. Meaning appeared towards the end of the movie, when viewers are introduced to a character who has been referenced but not shown: Mojito’s great-uncle, who built the magical tower, and seems to watch over the spirit world.
When this world is in danger of crumbling, the old man attempts to hand over his legacy to Mahito, who surprisingly declines. Before anything else, the Parakeet King approaches and knocks down the blocks that are used to maintain balance. The spirit world falls, sliding and crumbling into a void, and Mahito, Natsuko and the heron barely escape. The old man stays behind, watching his universe fall around him. If this character represents Miyazaki, then Mahito might represent his own son, who refused to inherit Studio Ghibli from him. This, theoretically, would confer some deeper meaning to the film, but ends up just making everything more convoluted.
As an IndieWire review by David Ehrlich says: “It should be understood that ‘The Boy and the Heron’ is among the most beautiful movies ever drawn, and that being immersed in an animated world so lush and alive after a decade of ‘Minions’ feels like… well, remember when Anton Ego tasted his first bite of that magical ratatouille? Now imagine that he’d almost exclusively eaten 3D-printed soy meat for an entire decade before sitting down for that fateful meal. It feels kind of like that.”
It’s an incredibly animated movie. It’s a beautiful, dreamlike experience and… there’s a lot that doesn’t make sense. It amplifies many aspects of Miyazaki’s previous movies, like the vibrant animation and the incredible side characters, but also the looseness of plot. It also isn’t nearly as emotionally compelling as many other Studio Ghibli movies, partly due to the mostly very reserved main character.
If you’re a fan of animation or if you’re interested in any kind of art, this movie is a must-watch. If you’re new to Miyazaki, I would recommend starting with another one of his works of art, like Spirited Away, Totoro, Ponyo, or Princess Mononoke.
