The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli
Initial release: July 14, 2023
Hayao Miyazaki keeps telling us he’s done. Every new movie he puts out, he says “this is the last one, I’m not your anime directing monkey, fuck off.” And like clockwork, he comes bursting back in a few years later, yelling “AND ANOTHER THING!” At 84 years old as of this writing and after a lifetime in the anime industry, he’s probably entitled to the cantankerous artist act; he’s certainly entitled to a little bit of trolling, too. When he did The Wind Rises, it raised controversy for being frustratingly difficult to pin down in terms of where it stood on Japan’s involvement in the war. While his last film — last as in “most recent,” not last as in “final,” though it’s that too, until proven otherwise — The Boy and the Heron is, at heart, a fairy tale about grief, it touches on the war nevertheless.
Heron opens amidst the war. Mahito wakes up to realize the hospital where his mother is at is burning, and there is nothing he can do about it. Fast forward a year or so; Mahito’s father — who runs a fighter plane factory — has married his late wife’s younger sister, the family evacuating to the sisters’ old family estate out in the country as the United States draws ever closer to the home islands. Mahito doesn’t really have much regard for Natsuko, his aunt-turned-stepmother, despite her attempts to build a relationship with him. Her pregnancy is difficult, which only further divides them. Wandering the grounds, Mahito comes across a mysterious talking grey heron, who eventually leads him to a crumbling, old stone tower, where the family patriarch mysteriously disappeared decades ago, with promises of meeting his mother again. After Natsuko disappears into the surrounding forest, Mahito investigates the tower despite the protestations of the old women who run the day-to-day doings of the estate; one thing leads to another and he falls into a fairy tale world run by giant carnivorous parakeets. (It makes sense in context.)
There are two ways of looking at this movie. On its surface, it’s a beautiful, if surreal, fairy tale, with a fairly logically constructed world; but if you’re the kind of person who likes to think about lore and power systems and who would win in a fight with Goku, you are going to be sorely disappointed. The core of this film is about grief; grief for a dead parent, grief for a world ruined by war. Grief for all the things that could have been but weren’t. Mahito struggles to relate to people; he’s rude at the dinner table, avoids his aunt, and while he tolerates one of the grannies following him, he keeps telling her she doesn’t have to keep going as he ventures further into the tower. Unaccepted at school, he gets into a fight, before inexplicably hitting himself in the head with a rock.
The world inside the tower is beautiful and fantastical, but it has its dark corners, a fact revealed fairly immediately with Mahito being rescued from the entrance to a forbidding ancient tomb. Nothing emerges from it, but the implication is that you don’t want to be there if something does. There’s also the parakeets, enormous and doofy looking, yet capable of incredible violence. (I always knew those little bastards were constantly plotting murder…) Mahito’s only real defense against them is Himi, a young woman looking rather strikingly like Mahito’s mother, who keeps threats at bay with her powers of fire.
None of this is explained, and none of it needs explaining. Miyazaki is known for his beautifully-animated fantasy worlds; it’s probably the defining trait of everything he’s ever done. Even The Wind Rises — very grounded compared to other Miyazaki films — has its literal flights of fantasy. The world of Heron is a daydream, the kind of place you might go if you’re a young child going through a series of traumatic experiences.
Like all of Miyazaki’s films, Heron is interesting to look at through the lens of Miyazaki’s own experiences. Born during the war and forced to evacuate to the countryside as a child, he had a strong relationship with his mother, who was herself headstrong and intellectual; her influence can be seen throughout Miyazaki’s films. Grief plays a large role in the film; it’s clear that as Miyazaki enters his twilight years he has begun to reflect on the things we all lose on our journeys through life. And the thing about Mahito’s dad running a fighter plane factory? Well, that’s just Miyazaki’s own father, right there (and it caused a bit of a stir, just like The Wind Rises did a decade prior.)
The Boy and the Heron is one of the most beautifully animated films ever made. To be sure, It’s not the easiest to follow, despite sharing a lot of elements with Miyazaki’s earlier films, but I’m not sure that’s all that important. As the film nears its conclusion and the fantasy begins to literally fall apart, the symbolism is clear: the daydream is over, but Mahito has learned something about life. Miyazaki clearly hopes you will too.