The Boy and the Heron
STUDIO GhibliHayao Miyazaki is exhausted. One doesn’t need to see his first film in ten years, The Boy and the Heron, to realize it, but it’s even more apparent if one does. The acclaimed Studio Ghibli filmmaker has many ideas to put on paper, but seems tired at the prospect of doing so. All he wants to do is sit back and enjoy the remainder of his life, as his contribution to the advancement of animation will forever be cemented in the annals of film history.
But Miyazaki’s brain says otherwise – he has the urge to tell stories again and a willingness to enthrall audiences with his current mediations, which is why his retirement from public life and Studio Ghibli after the release of The Wind Rises was short-lived. Miyazaki began to work on The Boy and the Heron (titled in Japan: How Do You Live?) in 2016, which is why there is great urgency that this film must be seen, but delays forced by the COVID-19 pandemic and a slower animation pace caused the film to be released seven years later.
When the film was released in Japan earlier this year, Ghibli only advertised it through one poster. No trailers, images, or plot synopsis. Nothing. Just an image of a Heron with a release date. Of course, America doesn’t have the balls to do this, and images started to pour out online when GKIDS acquired international rights to the production and retitled How Do You Live? to The Boy and the Heron. The original title is far more apt, because the film isn’t necessarily about Mahito’s (Soma Santoki) relationship with the Heron (Masaki Suda).
Yes, the Heron is the catalyst for the film’s plot, as he tells Mahito his mother (Aimyon), who tragically died during a hospital fire, is alive and waiting for him in a tower. When he arrives in a tower, his mother is an optical illusion created by the Heron, who transports him to an alternate reality where he is tasked to rescue his aunt Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), who has married Mahito’s father (Takuya Kimura) and is expecting a child. In that world, he meets alternate versions of Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki) and his mother, who helps him rescue Natsuko from the evil Parakeet King (Jun Kunimura).
From there, the story fragments itself in so many directions, and Miyazaki loses himself in a sea of subplots and poorly defined constructs from an alternate reality full of contradictions. Perhaps it’s by design, but the rules he initially defines within an alternate reality keep changing, and it gets increasingly difficult to follow Mahito along on his quest, no matter how show-stopping the entire thing looks. There’s no denying the singularity of Miyazaki’s work amongst the pantheon of animators, and as one of the very last artisans who resists the CGI craze that many animated studios have adopted (Ghibli experimented with it through Goro’s Earwig and the Witch, and the results are pitiful).
Because of this, there isn’t a single frame of The Boy and the Heron that doesn’t look ripe with detail at every turn. Every single shot is a marvel to behold, particularly on IMAX, where the lived-in environment pulls the audience inside a fantastical world with a plethora of surprises at every corner, where cannibal parakeets lurk at every corner, warawaras float in the air after eating the intestines of a fish, and mouth-watering food so delicious-looking it’ll make anyone who’s not living in this world jealous.
And several visually arresting sequences reaffirm Miyazaki’s place in the greatest filmmakers' pantheon. The cold open that introduces audiences to Mahito, seeing him sprinting into the fire to save his mother, is striking enough to warrant anyone’s attention from the minute the film begins until its classic end credits scroll appears. Another particularly impressive setpiece is staged in an alternate reality and sees the warawaras being eaten by pelicans, with Mahito’s mother warding them away with magical powers. It’s pure Miyazaki. Lived-in constructs have a fantastical element that gives enough whimsy to widen anyone’s eyes in pure awe. The IMAX frame helps sell the immersion and gives a grander scale to a world larger than life on its own. Miyazaki’s penchant for crafting such fully-realized universes through his pen can’t be beaten, no matter how many animators have [desperately] tried to replicate him (including his own son with Tales of the Earthsea, whom Miyazaki famously walked out of).
These filmmakers fail to realize that only Hayao Miyazaki can do Hayao Miyazaki. Goro wants to step into the shadow of his father, but he isn’t him and will never be him, as much as he continuously tries to impress Hayao. Perhaps if he were to do Goro Miyazaki instead of Wannabe Hayao Miyazaki, he would find some success within the Ghibli ecosystem. The perfect example of this is to look at the late Isao Takahata’s work in relation to Hayao Miyazaki’s. Their animation and storytelling styles couldn’t be more different. Miyazaki couldn’t have done My Neighbors the Yamadas or The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, while Takahata certainly couldn’t have come up with Princess Mononoke or My Neighbor Totoro. And yet, their styles somewhat complement each other within Studio Ghibli, because they’re not trying to do the same thing.
In that regard, The Boy and the Heron is one of Miyazaki’s most soulfully animated pieces of his storied career. But where it fascinates in his creation of memorable figures and visually sumptuous worlds, the film ultimately fails at drawing a good story. The film's core plot begins to scatter itself as soon as Mahito enters the parallel world, leaving audiences confused about what to grasp within the world. Is the film a parable to the ongoing Pacific War, which has an important place in its opening scenes, or should audiences pay more attention to the mediations on life and grief that Miyazaki attempts to posit through the figure of Mahito and the Granduncle (Shōhei Hino), who gives him the ultimate choice in controlling the fate of the world? Oh, and how about those cannibal parakeets and the king? Remember them? No one will by the time the film ends, as he is one of the most underdeveloped antagonists in any Miyazaki film to date.
Because of this, The Boy and the Heron doesn’t reach the heights that Miyazaki initially ended his career with The Wind Rises, which acted as both a celebration and a testament of his entire oeuvre. Unfortunately, The Boy and the Heron’s story is too dense to impact anyone watching, and one can feel how tired Miyazaki is just by observing how he stages the story's shell this time versus when he left audiences in 2013 with The Wind Rises. There’s no denying how gifted of a visual storyteller he is, one of the greatest in cinema history, but one should know when to stop, particularly when germinating ideas are so large to be treated in one film, let alone a 124-minute one. If the body says, “Stop. Catch your breath,” but the mind wants to continue telling stories to keep it at ease, how do you live?