Final Rating: 4/5
Two summers ago, I did a retrospective on all of Studio Ghibli’s films (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). As someone who’s been a lifelong fan of anime, I definitely have my opinions on the studio and its works. Like most people, my favorite films from Hayao Miyazaki are Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle. I have My Neighbor Totoro as my least favorite (I never had nostalgia for it growing up and by the time I watched it, I found it too oriented to children for my liking). I think Porco Rosso is an underrated classic (after all, I’d rather be a pig than a fascist). I personally think that Isao Takahata’s body of work is overall stronger than Miyazaki’s, and that The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is the singular greatest film the studio has ever produced (it’s one of the only films to move me to literal tears).
So of course I was excited to hear that Hayao Miyazaki would be returning from his retirement for the fourth time, and I was even more excited that NYFF added an extra screening for The Boy and the Heron when I was only 100 people or so away from getting to the front of its virtual queue. There was some trepidation – some initial reviews out of Japan seemed mixed and most people seem to have written it off as not likely to win Best Animated Feature this year.
If you are interested at all in seeing The Boy and the Heron and want to do so as blind as possible (as the lack of marketing before the Japanese release intended), you can stop reading after this paragraph – the film is great, and a worthy entry to the Ghibli canon. If you need a bit more convincing, or perhaps have already seen the film and want to read more about it, carry on.
From the very first sequence of the film where protagonist Mahito in mid-WW2 Japan rushes toward a burning hospital where his mother is, I shouldn’t have been worried. The dynamism and frantic motion of the characters contrasted to the leaping fire proves that nearly sixty years into his career, Miyazaki can still work magic with a pen in ways I’ve never seen done before. Elsewhere in the film, the titular heron and other birds – pelicans, parakeets and others in flight are beautifully, realistically and naturally rendered in a way that feels even smoother than anything CG animation could hope to replicate.
Of course there are Ghibli staples – food that looks more delicious than anything in real life, tears that well up well past the point of water tension, grandmothers with comically large noses, which brings a sense of familiarity to the world. And of course we must mention long-time collaborator composer Joe Hisashi who has scored every single Miyazaki film since Nausicaa. His subtle yet powerful piano melodies arguably rival the iconic themes of Spirited Away and Mononke in some of his best work of his career.
In a sense, this film does remix a lot of themes from other Miyazaki and Ghibli films. Little spirits known as warawara are reminiscent of Spirited Away’s soot sprites or the kodama of Princess Mononoke. Of course there’s the idea of crossing into a fantastically magical world as in Spirited Away, and of moving out to the rural countryside such as in Totoro. Even Miyazaki’s ever constant love of airplanes present in Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises makes a cameo as his father leads up an airplane factory. It was stated that the reason Miyazaki came out of retirement was to produce something he could leave behind for his grandchild, and this film certainly serves as a greatest hits mashup of his best.
Beyond the surface level through lines that Ghibli fans will recognize though, Miyazaki leaves a message for his grandson about grief, death and moving on. After Mahito’s mother dies, his father remarries with his mother’s sister. Understandably, Mahito has trouble adjusting both to the new relationship and to life in the countryside. It is through his fantastical journey for the second and third acts of the film, prompted by the titular heron, that he finds the resolve to come to peace with his mother’s death and the malice he sees in the world around him. It is fitting that the original (and in my opinion superior) Japanese title is “How Do You Live” (a reference to a Japanese novel of the same name that appears within the film); after all Mahito finds his own way to keep on living, and Miyazaki asks us and his grandson, how we intend to go on living.
If there is something keeping this film back from perfection (which let’s be clear, an above average Ghibli film is likely better than most of what Western animation puts out), it would be how the film meanders somewhat halfway through the fantastical journey. It is as though Miyazaki had all these ideas for the world he dreamt up and struggled to find a way to cohesively portray it all in a streamlined manner. Looking at his best work Spirited Away, which has its own world with society and rules that we had but a glimpse of, while still maintaining a fairly straightforward and understandable plot. Chihiro needs to undertake trials to free her parents from the spirit world and finds her own maturity in the process. Or Mononoke has the fairly straightforward environmentalist story of industry versus nature.
Here Miyazaki somewhat loses the thread halfway through the journey into the fantastical, lost in the world of his own imagination that we somewhat need to speed through to the ending, which thankfully picks up the plot and concludes satisfactorily. Perhaps not the most concise and straightforward of his films, but at the very least we get a visual spectacle in the process.
At the end of the day, the inevitable question of where does this rank among Miyazaki’s films comes up. While I don’t think that it reaches the heights of Spirited, Mononoke or Howl’s, I solidly have it in the top five, about on par with Porco Rosso (again a bit of a hot take from me but there’s something romantic about a pig fighting fascists in the Mediterranean). If nothing else, this shows that even with a ten year hiatus, the master hasn’t lost his touch and knowing that Miyazaki already has a plan to come back and work on yet another film has me excited all the more.
The Boy and the Heron was seen during the New York Film Festival.
