Hayao Miyazaki is going ecstatically into that good night.
In the wake of 2013’s The Wind Rises, his supposed final film, the master Japanese animator returns with The Boy and the Heron—and it’s hardly the work of someone coming out of retirement to rotely play the hits. As urgent, immediate, and imaginative as anything he has made, The Boy and the Heron is another elusively dreamy yet piercingly intimate fantasia, one that merges the pensive playfulness of My Neighbor Totoro with the visionary world-building of Princess Mononoke. (Or, if you prefer, Spirited Away with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.) It’s nearly an apotheosis, in that the movie synthesizes his greatest achievements into a stirring, standalone work of art.
That’s expansive praise for a film that begins in disarming simplicity. After a brief, harrowing prelude—in which 12-year-old Mahito Maki (voiced by Soma Santoki) helplessly watches as the hospital where his mother works burns down during World War II—the film moves to the quiet country estate of Mahito’s mother’s family. In the wake of his mother’s death, Mahito’s father, owner of a weapons factory, has married her younger sister, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), who soon becomes pregnant. Despite the kindness of Natsuko and the attentiveness of a large staff of diminutive older housekeepers (I love how they all move in a group as if they were a single organism), Mahito resists the formation of this new family, instead channeling his grief into a feud with a pesky gray heron that flies about the grounds.
If The Boy and the Heron had only consisted of these scenes—the bird gliding over Mahito’s head, then elegantly meeting its reflection as it lands in the water—I would have been satisfied. (My favorite part of Joe Hisaishi’s deceptively simple score is the way a few delicate piano keys announce the creature’s arrival.) But even Totoro expanded in imagination to include The Catbus. And so strange things begin happening, starting with the fact that we notice, at times, the heron appears to have human-like teeth. One day, while Mahito is standing near the water’s edge, dozens of frogs crawl out and climb over him, while several fish stick their heads out of the water and say, “Please join us.” Soon we hear the heron’s voice as well—Masaki Suda gives the bird the gravelly rasp of an irritated smoker—as it invites Mahito to follow him into a nearby abandoned tower, which leads to . . . well, that’s also for you to discover.
I will describe some of the imagery Miyazaki and his animators offer, as The Boy and the Heron explodes with uncanny creativity from here on out. Ships sail on a dark sea, shafts of light piercing through the black clouds above. Tiny white blob-like creatures called warawara float into the air when they “mature,” like living balloons. Giant, carnivorous parakeets greet Mahito with cries of “Eatable! Eatable!” (They’re right up there with the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz as far as terrifying creatures in children’s films go.) We also meet a handful of compelling characters more directly related to Mahito’s family and his heaving grief. Like Totoro, The Boy and the Heron lobbies for the legitimacy—indeed, the necessity—of imagination when it comes to processing the personal losses of everyday life.
At the same time—and much like The Wind Rises, an animated biopic of sorts about the designer of the Zero fighter planes used by Japan in World War II—The Boy and the Heron considers trauma on a larger, societal scale. The cost of war, no matter what nation you belong to, haunts both films in visceral ways. (The opening sequence of the hospital fire is a masterclass in animation of its own, employing a blurring backdrop to capture Mahito’s distress, alongside floating embers that throb with a 3D intensity.) Notice, too, how Mahito’s first instinct when annoyed by the heron is to do what his father does: make weapons, in this case a bow and arrow. In a touch that combines Miyazaki’s wit and wisdom, Mahito attaches one of the heron’s feathers to the arrow, which gives the projectile an unruly mind of its own.
Near the end of The Boy and the Heron, we meet a wizard-like character who embodies wit and wisdom, as well (along with a tender note of weariness). Speaking to Mahito, he discusses his desire to “create a world of bounty, peace, and beauty.” Against all odds, that’s what Miyazaki has managed to do, yet again.
(12/8/2023)
