For the birds
To get the pedantic bit out of the way first, the Japanese title of Miyazaki Hayao's twelfth and probably final feature film, the 21st and probably final theatrical feature released by Studio Ghibli, the great animation company he co-founded in the 1980s, is 君たちはどう生きるか. This translates to How Do You Live?, which is also the title of a 1937 coming-of-age novel by Yoshino Genzaburo that has no plot points at all in common with Miyazaki's story, though it puts in a cameo as a book read by the depressed young teenage protagonist Mahito (Santoki Soma). But that's not important right now, what's important is that How Do You Live? is, like, obviously a better title, both as a phrase in and of itself and as a guide towards the mood and meaning of the film, than The Boy and the Heron, which is the title it's being distributed under in the English-speaking world, I believe at the direction of Studio Ghibli itself rather than flat-footed initiative of the local distributors. This is not, to be fair, the first time that Ghibli has dumbed-down one of its titles for international audiences: The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro has mythic resonances not found in Spirited Away, and Tanuki War of the Heisei - Pompoko is, I think, better at capturing both the grandeur and the weirdness of its story than just plain Pom Poko. But The Boy and the Heron doesn't even point in the same direction as How Do You Live?, reducing a question of morality and philosophy to a fairly blunt catalogue description of an adventure movie in which the prime movers are, indeed, a boy and a heron.
Rant over. By any name, The Boy and the Heron is a story of loss, regret, and moving on: it opens with Mahito, in the midst of the Second World War,* hearing sirens and racing through his house in the dark of night in Tokyo, scrambling through the busy streets towards a great roaring fire consuming the hospital where his mother works, its heat distortions represented by wobbly, grotesque lines in the animated image. It's a suitably horrific opening gambit for a film that is surprisingly invested in loading horrific imagery into Miyazaki's usual lavish, rich-looking aesthetic, which has only flirted with anything horrifying in very tiny ways in Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away; also, inasmuch as the new movie is designed as a tribute to the entire history of Studio Ghibli, not just Miyazaki's own films there (and it's at least somewhat doing that), this is something of a nod to the work of Miyazaki's longest-time colleague and occasional antagonist, the late Takahata Isao, combining iconic imagery from that director's 1988 Grave of the Fireflies and 2013 The Tale of the Princess Kaguya in its disorienting opening plunge into an infernal hell. The whole thing is done in only a couple of minutes, at which time we jump ahead some months to find Mahito evacuating out of Tokyo with his father Shoichi (Kimura Takuya), to the estate of Mahito's late mother's family: notably, her younger sister Natsuko (Kimuro Yoshino), who is now married to Shoichi. This is not sitting well with Mahito at all, as one would expect, though it does seem to wound Natsuko that her nephew-son is so cold to her despite her ongoing good-faith efforts to make some kind of positive new life for him in this rambling old country home. But that's okay, he's cold to everybody: it's very obvious that Mahito is deep in the grips of a powerful depression, the kind that drives him to somewhat idly crash a sharp rock into his head one day on the way home from school - maybe for the attention, maybe to get his bullies in trouble, but it feels kind of horribly like it's "just because".
This gets us a nice little way through the unhurried 124 minutes of The Boy and the Heron, just slowly delving into Mahito's gloom and how it makes everything around him seem bleaker and duller, and I would even probably have been enthusiastically onboard with Miyazaki making his second-ever film mostly devoid of genre elements (after his most recent "last film before retirement", 2013's The Wind Rises), but we already have by this point met the grey heron who makes up the second half of the English title, a weirdly belligerent creature that keeps hanging around Mahito's bedroom window threateningly, and it is through him that the movie begins to embrace its fantasy elements. At night the heron, speaking in a hideous croaking voice (provided by Suda Masaki; I have not seen the English dub and will not see the English dub, as is my custom, but I am led to understand that Robert Pattinson has put great effort into exactly replicating the hostile scraping noises in Suda's performance) begins taunting Mahito with cruel references to the boy's trauma, and after a couple of days of this, Natsuko disappears into the forest outside the estate. Mahito follows her, along with one of the family's seven elderly maids, Kiriko (Shibasaki Ko), and they find themselves inside the mysterious old tower on the estate's outskirts, along with the heron; Mahito shoots with an arrow he fashioned out of one of the bird's own feather, piercing its beak and forcing it to transform into a kind of goblin creature, a heron's body with a grotesque human head popping out of its beak, which is now slumped back like a hood. The boy, the maid, and the heron-man all descend through the floor of the tower and into a completely different world than the one they left behind, and at this point The Boy and the Heron firmly steps away from the point that a plot synopsis is going to get us anywhere at all. It's an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland riff, not even Miyazaki's first (narratively, this film resembles Spirited Away more than any other two Miyazaki films resemble each other), but of all the dozens and dozens of movies playing around in that sandbox, it's very rare to find one as dedicated as this to the principle that the way to create a feeling of an horrifyingly arbitrary fantasy world is to leap recklessly between strange and inexplicable setpieces that operate according to their own warped logic but don't really want to yield up that logic for a spectator unless they absolutely have to. Certainly, the links between those setpieces are aggressively nonsensical.
This does all end up going someplace - two places, in fact. On one level, of course, Mahito's experiences throw him far enough outside of his comfort zone and demand that he rewire his thoughts enough that he ends up being able to move beyond his deppressive attachment to his sadness and appreciate the bond that Natsuko is trying to offer him. On another level, Miyzaki is very, very sorry to have fucked up his entire career. Without giving too much away, The Boy and the Heron depicts a rich and weird and expansive fantasy world that is falling apart because there's nobody ready to take it over and use their own imagination to keep it thriving; in other words, Takahata and Miyazaki never succeeded in mentoring a successor, and when Miyazaki has made this film, Studio Ghibli will collapse into ruins, or pop like a soap bubble, or dissolve away into morning mist (it is maybe ironic or maybe inevitable that Studio Ponoc, the company made by ex-Ghibli folks that has pretty much explicitly defined its brand as "the successor to Ghibli", contributed to this film's animation production). It is a cynical, self-lacerating work of auto-fiction, with Old Man Miyazaki pleading with Young Boy Miyzaki to please come to his rescue - for that's who Mahito is, of course. He's older than Miyazaki (Mahito would have been born around 1931, Miyazaki was born in 1941), but both have childhoods shaped by the war, both have dark imaginative landscapes populated by mirror images of the bombed-out wreckage of the war, both found solace in How Do You Live? as a way to step outside of themselves and their own emotional problems. Such bald-faced auteurist symbolism is of course lazy criticism, but for Miyazaki of all people I think we can justify it.
So anyway, a story about the limits of imagination, a story about the danger of being obsessed with death to the point that you forget to appreciate life: so maybe that's why it's kind of Miyazaki's first horror movie. Not literally; it's still an episodic adventure through a wild fantasy landscape of strange creatures, and the feeling that there are ultimately no villains, only people whose desires have gotten too hungry, keeps this from ever really being able to tap in to proper horror. But it does have a lot of horrific imagery, even before it gets to its fantasy kingdom. In one particular vivid scene, a seeming army of gawping fish crowd into Mahito, before a wave frogs sweeps over him like he's drowning in mud. And the heron is a real beast of nightmares: the closer he comes to revealing his magical nature, the more his body grows unpleasantly bulky and un-birdlike in its musculature, and the more his beak starts to warp around his hideous humanoid teeth. Inside the fantasy realm, there's even more of this morbid, dark imagery, with its early wander through the wind-soaked emptiness of a post-apocalyptic and its late visit to an abattoir, with plenty of scenes of violence and death peppered in between. It's not a gentle movie, in the way so many of the director's films have been; even "just" as an adventure (and that is, ultimately, its primary mode), there's a sense of unearthly, inexplicable danger throughout so much of these, even its most playful and comedic moments. The film's goofiest-looking characters, brightly-colored parakeet-men with silly cartoon faces and googly eyes, are also its most savage, violent brutes. The cutest characters in the film, the ones that feel like they strolled right of the blanket-soft My Neighbor Totoro, are subject to the most horrifying, capricious fate. Gloom and doom soak through everything here; and this gets back to the film's "actual" title, because How Do You Live? is, in effect, the film's thesis: yes, everything dies; yes, there is suffering; so will you be brave enough to live anyway? And when the film answers a crisp, definitive "yes", it ends. This is still a morally generous film by one of cinema's all-time greatest humanists, and while he is a crankier, more cynical humanist than he was once upon a time, Miyazaki still wants us to see a way forward.
And the thing is, despite all of the heavy imagery, this is still a fundamentally generous depiction of a sad little kid who needs to learn that it's okay that other people want to love him. Mahito is more abrasive and chillier than many of Miyazaki's protagonists, but the film still respects his way of looking at the world, carefully managing narrative information to match what he learns even when it leaves us scrambling to fill in the gaps he already knows, framing shots with his limitations of perspective, both physical and emotional, and casting everything in the tones that match his mental state, as it shifts from stultifying domesticity to phantasmagorical horror to genuine magic to the incredible ambivalent coziness and stability of its final scene. As final statements go, I don't know that this feels as grandly declarative and all-encompassing as either The Wind Rises or Spirited Away would have, but as a simple statement of "here's what I think is bad but also good about the world", it's a very fine sentiment.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*Exactly where in the midst of war is unclear to me. All of the English-friendly online sources call it 1943, but one of the film's very first lines is Mahito saying, in voiceover, "three years into the war...", and while there are multiple options for when you can date the start of "the war" in a Japanese context, 1943 isn't really a candidate for the third year of it according to any of them. Unless one is counting the last three weeks of December 1941 as "a year" in and of themselves. It doesn't really matter, which is why it's in a footnote, but I spent a lot more time grousing over it than I should have, which is why I've written this down at all.
Rant over. By any name, The Boy and the Heron is a story of loss, regret, and moving on: it opens with Mahito, in the midst of the Second World War,* hearing sirens and racing through his house in the dark of night in Tokyo, scrambling through the busy streets towards a great roaring fire consuming the hospital where his mother works, its heat distortions represented by wobbly, grotesque lines in the animated image. It's a suitably horrific opening gambit for a film that is surprisingly invested in loading horrific imagery into Miyazaki's usual lavish, rich-looking aesthetic, which has only flirted with anything horrifying in very tiny ways in Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away; also, inasmuch as the new movie is designed as a tribute to the entire history of Studio Ghibli, not just Miyazaki's own films there (and it's at least somewhat doing that), this is something of a nod to the work of Miyazaki's longest-time colleague and occasional antagonist, the late Takahata Isao, combining iconic imagery from that director's 1988 Grave of the Fireflies and 2013 The Tale of the Princess Kaguya in its disorienting opening plunge into an infernal hell. The whole thing is done in only a couple of minutes, at which time we jump ahead some months to find Mahito evacuating out of Tokyo with his father Shoichi (Kimura Takuya), to the estate of Mahito's late mother's family: notably, her younger sister Natsuko (Kimuro Yoshino), who is now married to Shoichi. This is not sitting well with Mahito at all, as one would expect, though it does seem to wound Natsuko that her nephew-son is so cold to her despite her ongoing good-faith efforts to make some kind of positive new life for him in this rambling old country home. But that's okay, he's cold to everybody: it's very obvious that Mahito is deep in the grips of a powerful depression, the kind that drives him to somewhat idly crash a sharp rock into his head one day on the way home from school - maybe for the attention, maybe to get his bullies in trouble, but it feels kind of horribly like it's "just because".
This gets us a nice little way through the unhurried 124 minutes of The Boy and the Heron, just slowly delving into Mahito's gloom and how it makes everything around him seem bleaker and duller, and I would even probably have been enthusiastically onboard with Miyazaki making his second-ever film mostly devoid of genre elements (after his most recent "last film before retirement", 2013's The Wind Rises), but we already have by this point met the grey heron who makes up the second half of the English title, a weirdly belligerent creature that keeps hanging around Mahito's bedroom window threateningly, and it is through him that the movie begins to embrace its fantasy elements. At night the heron, speaking in a hideous croaking voice (provided by Suda Masaki; I have not seen the English dub and will not see the English dub, as is my custom, but I am led to understand that Robert Pattinson has put great effort into exactly replicating the hostile scraping noises in Suda's performance) begins taunting Mahito with cruel references to the boy's trauma, and after a couple of days of this, Natsuko disappears into the forest outside the estate. Mahito follows her, along with one of the family's seven elderly maids, Kiriko (Shibasaki Ko), and they find themselves inside the mysterious old tower on the estate's outskirts, along with the heron; Mahito shoots with an arrow he fashioned out of one of the bird's own feather, piercing its beak and forcing it to transform into a kind of goblin creature, a heron's body with a grotesque human head popping out of its beak, which is now slumped back like a hood. The boy, the maid, and the heron-man all descend through the floor of the tower and into a completely different world than the one they left behind, and at this point The Boy and the Heron firmly steps away from the point that a plot synopsis is going to get us anywhere at all. It's an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland riff, not even Miyazaki's first (narratively, this film resembles Spirited Away more than any other two Miyazaki films resemble each other), but of all the dozens and dozens of movies playing around in that sandbox, it's very rare to find one as dedicated as this to the principle that the way to create a feeling of an horrifyingly arbitrary fantasy world is to leap recklessly between strange and inexplicable setpieces that operate according to their own warped logic but don't really want to yield up that logic for a spectator unless they absolutely have to. Certainly, the links between those setpieces are aggressively nonsensical.
This does all end up going someplace - two places, in fact. On one level, of course, Mahito's experiences throw him far enough outside of his comfort zone and demand that he rewire his thoughts enough that he ends up being able to move beyond his deppressive attachment to his sadness and appreciate the bond that Natsuko is trying to offer him. On another level, Miyzaki is very, very sorry to have fucked up his entire career. Without giving too much away, The Boy and the Heron depicts a rich and weird and expansive fantasy world that is falling apart because there's nobody ready to take it over and use their own imagination to keep it thriving; in other words, Takahata and Miyazaki never succeeded in mentoring a successor, and when Miyazaki has made this film, Studio Ghibli will collapse into ruins, or pop like a soap bubble, or dissolve away into morning mist (it is maybe ironic or maybe inevitable that Studio Ponoc, the company made by ex-Ghibli folks that has pretty much explicitly defined its brand as "the successor to Ghibli", contributed to this film's animation production). It is a cynical, self-lacerating work of auto-fiction, with Old Man Miyazaki pleading with Young Boy Miyzaki to please come to his rescue - for that's who Mahito is, of course. He's older than Miyazaki (Mahito would have been born around 1931, Miyazaki was born in 1941), but both have childhoods shaped by the war, both have dark imaginative landscapes populated by mirror images of the bombed-out wreckage of the war, both found solace in How Do You Live? as a way to step outside of themselves and their own emotional problems. Such bald-faced auteurist symbolism is of course lazy criticism, but for Miyazaki of all people I think we can justify it.
So anyway, a story about the limits of imagination, a story about the danger of being obsessed with death to the point that you forget to appreciate life: so maybe that's why it's kind of Miyazaki's first horror movie. Not literally; it's still an episodic adventure through a wild fantasy landscape of strange creatures, and the feeling that there are ultimately no villains, only people whose desires have gotten too hungry, keeps this from ever really being able to tap in to proper horror. But it does have a lot of horrific imagery, even before it gets to its fantasy kingdom. In one particular vivid scene, a seeming army of gawping fish crowd into Mahito, before a wave frogs sweeps over him like he's drowning in mud. And the heron is a real beast of nightmares: the closer he comes to revealing his magical nature, the more his body grows unpleasantly bulky and un-birdlike in its musculature, and the more his beak starts to warp around his hideous humanoid teeth. Inside the fantasy realm, there's even more of this morbid, dark imagery, with its early wander through the wind-soaked emptiness of a post-apocalyptic and its late visit to an abattoir, with plenty of scenes of violence and death peppered in between. It's not a gentle movie, in the way so many of the director's films have been; even "just" as an adventure (and that is, ultimately, its primary mode), there's a sense of unearthly, inexplicable danger throughout so much of these, even its most playful and comedic moments. The film's goofiest-looking characters, brightly-colored parakeet-men with silly cartoon faces and googly eyes, are also its most savage, violent brutes. The cutest characters in the film, the ones that feel like they strolled right of the blanket-soft My Neighbor Totoro, are subject to the most horrifying, capricious fate. Gloom and doom soak through everything here; and this gets back to the film's "actual" title, because How Do You Live? is, in effect, the film's thesis: yes, everything dies; yes, there is suffering; so will you be brave enough to live anyway? And when the film answers a crisp, definitive "yes", it ends. This is still a morally generous film by one of cinema's all-time greatest humanists, and while he is a crankier, more cynical humanist than he was once upon a time, Miyazaki still wants us to see a way forward.
And the thing is, despite all of the heavy imagery, this is still a fundamentally generous depiction of a sad little kid who needs to learn that it's okay that other people want to love him. Mahito is more abrasive and chillier than many of Miyazaki's protagonists, but the film still respects his way of looking at the world, carefully managing narrative information to match what he learns even when it leaves us scrambling to fill in the gaps he already knows, framing shots with his limitations of perspective, both physical and emotional, and casting everything in the tones that match his mental state, as it shifts from stultifying domesticity to phantasmagorical horror to genuine magic to the incredible ambivalent coziness and stability of its final scene. As final statements go, I don't know that this feels as grandly declarative and all-encompassing as either The Wind Rises or Spirited Away would have, but as a simple statement of "here's what I think is bad but also good about the world", it's a very fine sentiment.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*Exactly where in the midst of war is unclear to me. All of the English-friendly online sources call it 1943, but one of the film's very first lines is Mahito saying, in voiceover, "three years into the war...", and while there are multiple options for when you can date the start of "the war" in a Japanese context, 1943 isn't really a candidate for the third year of it according to any of them. Unless one is counting the last three weeks of December 1941 as "a year" in and of themselves. It doesn't really matter, which is why it's in a footnote, but I spent a lot more time grousing over it than I should have, which is why I've written this down at all.
