The Boy and the Heron

Hayao Miyazaki contends with his legacy—and with his rage.

The Boy and the Heron, courtesy of GKIDS and Studio Ghibli

At first glance, The Boy and the Heron bears a striking resemblance to the well-known beats of Hayao Miyazaki’s previous work. The plot should sound familiar to anyone who’s seen Spirited Away: a lonely child, through no choice of their own, must move away from Tokyo to the countryside, but they land instead in a world of spirits, where they must come to grips with their own failings before they can return home. Pull back a little, though, and The Boy and the Heron comes into focus a little better. This film is stranger, more experimental, and more assured than its plot lets on. Miyazaki isn’t interested in retreading familiar ground for nostalgia’s sake. He’s contending with his own legacy as an artist, with all the weight and experience of his career behind him.

Miyazaki has a reputation, at least among American cinephiles, as a sophisticated filmmaker whose movies are appropriate for children. It’s true that Miyazaki’s protagonists are primarily young people: Chihiro in Spirited Away is eleven, Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service is thirteen, and even Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle is in her early twenties, though she’s been cursed to inhabit the body of an old woman. My Neighbor Totoro captures the experience of being a child at play better than any other movie. But despite Miyazaki’s ability to make fantastical films of high quality that revolve around the very young, his films are concerned with matters that adults should also find challenging and rewarding: innocence in the face of corruption, the hard work of maintaining peace in a world that would much rather resort to fighting, and the corrosive nature of rage.

It’s this concern with rage that preoccupies The Boy and the Heron. Mahito (Soma Santoki) is a boy growing up during World War II. He’s lost his mother in a hospital fire, and as he leaves Tokyo for the Japanese countryside, he’s sorting through his grief and unspoken anger. The war is going poorly in the background; only the factory workers, children, and elderly are left. Mahito’s father has also remarried, leaving Mahito thrice isolated: his stepmother (Yoshino Kimura) is ill in bed, his father spends long days at the factory, and the boy is friendless in his strange new home. This isolation is only intensified by his surroundings. Mahito’s new home is built in a Western style, the present at odds with his schoolboy uniform and the traditional dress of the elderly people who also inhabit the house, tugging at the past. His only real company is a supernaturally menacing gray heron (Masaki Suda) who appears at his window, taunting him with his loss. Mahito’s world is falling apart, though outwardly he betrays no signs of his distress.

Miyazaki communicates Mahito’s inner turmoil with pulsing chaos. The art direction here is a touch looser than in Miyazaki’s previous work, though no less controlled. Clean lines become rasps of charcoal in sequences of extreme crisis, and there’s an organic ebb and flow of the animation that makes the bodies of the characters seem to burst off the screen, as though they cannot be contained by their drawn lines. The titular heron, a trickster figure, moves with the oily ease of ill intent. The more the heron reveals his character, the more uncanny he becomes, with massive square teeth protruding from his beak and all-too-human eyes set in his bird’s face.

The other hallmarks of Miyazaki’s work carry a sense of menace alongside the familiarity. Joe Hisaishi’s magnificent score is quieter and more measured than his other, more exuberant work on Miyazaki’s films. We see a massive fish gutted before it becomes a plate of delicious food. The rolling fields of green, so commonly a symbol of peace in Miyazaki’s work, lead to a stone portal of yawning darkness flanked by cedars in a nod to Arnold Böcklin’s painting Island of the Dead. Even the spirits that Mahito encounters on his journey are sources of anxiety: some are innocents in danger, and some pose an unexpected threat. As with Chihiro in Spirited Away, Mahito finds himself in a place governed by unyielding rules, though he must learn them as he goes. They are never explicitly spelled out, leading us to wonder whether Mahito is unknowingly teetering on the edge of danger. He’s an unreliable narrator himself: early in the film, he sustains a head injury, leaving the audience to question whether the things Mahito sees are real or hallucinations.

Miyazaki never stoops to clean-cut explanations. Still, he’s interested in pulling at the threads of substantial answers to cosmic questions. Translated, the film’s Japanese title is How Do You Live? It’s a question Miyazaki has been attempting to answer from different angles across his entire career. Porco Rosso is a rebuttal of fascism, while The Wind Rises is a meditation on good intentions being put to evil ends. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke are both affirmations of the value of environmental care and renouncements of violence. All of these films represent doing the right thing as difficult work that must be carried out over long years. We get the sense that Miyazaki believes wholeheartedly in the values he presents on the screen, and that he values them so highly because he knows they aren’t cheap. He’s always been angry about violence and injustice. His filmmaking has given him the ability to create worlds where things can be made right.

The beauty of The Boy and the Heron is that Mahito’s struggle is internal, not just symbolic. Because Miyazaki treats his protagonist’s grief and anger seriously, they become forces that affect Mahito’s world in surprising, tangible ways. He is a danger to himself and others, though Miyazaki never puts it crudely; the point doesn’t need to be made explicitly for it to be powerful. Mahito must make a choice about how he will live going forward. Miyazaki makes the resolution of that choice surprising and satisfying in equal measure, an affirmation of the hard work of a life well lived. —Sarah Welch-Larson

★★★★

The Boy and the Heron is in theaters everywhere this weekend.