Hayao Miyazaki‘s 2023 film The Boy and the Heron feels like a eulogy. An ineffable sense of loss permeates the story, an underlying sadness that follows a departure, and that feeling isn’t aimed toward any person or thing. The movie is, by turns, a self-eulogy for an aging filmmaker, a child coping with the death of a parent, a fear of change and growing up, and maybe a lament for the passing of childhood and the easy slide into imagination that comes with it. We could also view the story as a eulogy for a changing world and how we must let it, sometimes even choosing to make the changes with our hands.
On the surface, the plot follows Mahito, a young boy in Japan during World War II. When the film opens, Mahito loses his mother during the firebombing of Tokyo; his desperate run through the burning city to the hospital where she’s staying is a nightmare of flames, faces, and desperation. He fails to reach her in time, and our subsequent viewing of Mahito is as he and his father are leaving Tokyo to go to the countryside. His mother’s sister still lives in the family home, and she’s pregnant with his father’s child, something Mahito has mixed feelings about. But at this point, the boy is holding himself so tightly that he barely allows any emotions to surface. If he’s angry with his father, he doesn’t allow himself to show it. If he’s upset about his aunt’s words that she’s his new mother, he holds that feeling in. We see the hard work he’s putting in to keep himself to himself when he’s finally alone in his new bedroom in the family home: the moment he’s by himself, he collapses onto the bed as if the strings holding him up have been cut.
A great blue heron visits the garden at the new house, which is large, rambling, and a visual combination of temple and western home. The heron quickly zeroes in on Mahito, and before long, the boy hears the bird talking to him, and we begin to see a man emerge from the heron’s beak. The bird is tied to a strange structure built by a lost granduncle, and eventually, we learn that as a girl, Mahito’s mother vanished in the tower for two years. The granduncle seems to want Mahito to come to the tower as well. When he enters it, he discovers a fantastical world populated by echoes and shadows of his world, ultimately bringing him to the choice between staying and taking up his granduncle’s work or returning to Japan.
The film is loosely based on two books: How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino and The Book of Lost Things by John Conolly. Yoshino’s novel, published in 1937, actually appears in the film as a gift from Mahito’s mother, and its central question of how protagonist Copper ought to conduct himself to create the sort of world he wants to live in is thematically more present than anything more concrete. Although Mahito reads the book, he doesn’t speak about it, and it’s through his actions as he travels his granduncle’s world that we see him thinking about the novel’s title. On the other hand, Conolly’s novel is about a twelve-year-old boy grieving the death of his mother who finds himself journeying through a magical land ruled by a fading king. It’s darker than The Boy and the Heron, but one of the most striking elements of the film is the way it combines Conolly and Yoshino’s works to create a whole that, despite its clear transitions between real and imaginary worlds, feels organic.
We can also trace elements of many of Studio Ghibli‘s films through Mahito’s journey, which adds to the eulogy feel. While some elements are autobiographical to Miyazaki – during the war the family moved to the countryside for safety, while his father, like Mahito’s, worked in aviation – care seems to have been taken to plant seeds of what we know will become Ghibli films. The horrific opening scenes call out to Grave of the Fireflies, Granduncle’s tower is reminiscent of Howl’s from Howl’s Moving Castle. The salt marshes that appear several times in the film remind us of When Marnie Was There, ocean scenes call to mind Ponyo, and the move without Mahito’s mother – and later appearance of a new sibling – are straight out of My Neighbor Totoro. We can see elements of Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke as well, and Mahito’s father’s work brings up The Wind Rises. These bits and pieces make this a film that you almost have to see more than once because there are several different lenses through which it can be viewed.
GKIDS‘ release of the movie is available in several incarnations – as a steel book, as a 4K Ultra HD/BD combo, or as a regular BD/DVD set. (My review copy was the middle option.) The discs feature plenty of extras, including fascinating interviews with Joe Hisashi, Toshio Suzuki, and Takeshi Honda, storyboards, and drawing with supervising animator Honda, as well as the more basic trailers and a music video, while physical extras include a small poster and a booklet with Miyazaki’s initial notes. The picture quality is exquisite (and listening to Honda discuss CG versus hand-drawn animation adds to the appreciation of it), and the vocal casts are stellar. The English dub sounds like its own version of the script while staying close to how some Japanese voice actors speak their lines, with Robert Pattinson‘s heron being a particular stand out on this front.
Supervising animator Takeshi Honda says in his interview that he sees the first half of this film as lonely. That’s a fair statement, and it captures the same sort of quiet sorrow and loneliness as The Secret World of Arietty and When Marnie Was There, interestingly enough also based on children’s books. Loss in childhood can be lonely, and later, the loss of childhood can feel much the same. The Boy and the Heron, in which everything and nothing happens, captures those feelings in a film that is hopefully as much capstone as it is eulogy for a storied career.
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