Let’s kick off this year in reviews with a look at what is ostensibly the swansong of an iconic director…again. Maybe. Yes, it’s Hayao Miyazaki’s final film for at least the third time, a decade after his last entry with The Wind Rises—but in comparison to that one, we have a return to the fantastical settings and imagery he tends to be known for. So, if we presume that this is in fact how one of the most influential animation directors of all time signs off, how well does The Boy and The Heron turn out?
Inspired very loosely by the book ‘How Do You Live’ by Genzaboru Yoshino, this one feels in part more of a personal semi-autobiographical piece for Miyazaki himself—our main character Mahito (Soma Santoki) is a young boy in WW2-era Japan, also the son of a factory owner. Miyazaki has spoken of his own earliest memories being those of air raid bombings, and so our memorable opening scene is one of blurred figures and flames like a decades-faded memory itself.
The bulk of the film deals with what happens after Mahito is soon thereafter sent to stay with his father’s new wife Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura) in a country estate, surrounded by elderly servants. In time, a rather intrusive heron on the grounds starts becoming even more of a pest—and that’s before Mahito is soon drawn by this bird to enter the dilapidated private retreat of a missing great-uncle to find his stepmother, with everything getting only more fantastical by the second.
It’s essentially akin to Alice in Wonderland meets David Lynch by way of Salvador Dali—as far as Miyazaki goes it’s one of his most surreal, with every other sequence offering what’s no doubt intended as food for symbolism and interpretation, maybe to a fault at times. But at the same time, compared to his previous film, it’s an explosion of the sort of freedom of imagery animation allows—we have of course the moss-covered old buildings, verdant fields, and wide azure seas that have shown up before, though less so blobby soul-creatures falling upward through firestorms and killer pelicans. That’s not to say there’s no attempt at character—we have the grouchy trickster heron itself, a muscular fisherwoman, and even a rather memorable speaking role from a spirit-pelican itself, which for the most part I assure you all actually makes sense in context.
Perhaps it all gets a bit too dense near the end, between armies parakeets and a strange backstory for our mysterious great uncle figure that doesn’t seem to get resolved—but at the end, we do have what looks like Miyazaki taking a look at ideas of creative legacy that, if this is indeed his last, do fit well for something to bow out on. Certainly, for something that does feel like the id just taking hold of anything, it feels hard to think of anything to really top this.
It’s a bit hard to say more without really talking about all the themes and imagery scene by scene—but, while it’s perhaps not his strongest narratively, it’s something that once again shows off why Studio Ghibli is the legend in the animation name that it is, with every background a painting, and with montages both beautiful and stomach-churning. Personally, I’m not sure I’d rate it above Princess Mononoke or even Nausicaa—but it held my interest and made its mark for sure.
If it takes Miyazaki ten more years to make another film, he’ll be in his nineties by then, so the chances of that being a finale for him become quite a bit higher. But if he’s still able to storyboard something like this right now, it’s not like he’s run of juice in him just yet—whether this does mark the end of the era, or simply another predecessor to another project, it’s worth a watch indeed.
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