'The Boy and the Heron' review: Return of the king
Hayao Miyazaki's first film in a decade is a dream-like portrait of death and the afterlife
It has been 10 years since the last Hayao Miyazaki movie. 2013’s The Wind Rises was supposed to be the last Miyazaki movie, as the director claimed he was retiring.
Thankfully, that’s not true. The legendary animator and Studio Ghibli co-founder has returned, and many people are saying that this time around bird is the word.
His new film, The Boy and the Heron, is at times an elegiac, mournful, and patient dissection of grief and boyhood set during World War II. Other times, it is a rambunctious fantasy swarming with all kinds of feathered friends; terrifyingly predatory pelicans, a multi-colored gang of parakeets, and most distinctly of all, the grey heron of the title.
This heron (voiced by Masaki Suda) is an astonishingly realized creation. To most people, it has a simple beauty: long, skinny legs topped by a puffed-out midsection, and a slender neck topped by a wide, pointed head. But to 12-year-old Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki), the heron’s body is filled with grotesqueries hidden in plain sight.
First of all, he can hear this heron talk. Its voice, scratchy and impatient, yaps his mother’s final words to him. Then there are its teeth, which are gradually revealed to be an entire human head within the heron’s body. That head is concealed in the aforementioned puffed-out midsection, the bird acting as a strange costume for the unsightly man within.
All this to say, Mahito does not trust this birdman, and I wouldn’t either. Sent from Tokyo to the countryside after a bombing at a hospital kills his mother, the boy is alienated in grief. When the heron arrives saying Mahito has been summoned to some vague netherworld where his mother resides, he’s tempted. Who wouldn’t be?
The Boy and the Heron features a classic Ghibli mix of the sublime and the tragic. It grounds Mahito’s journey in a very stark emotional landscape. Even as he and the grey heron sink to another, surreal realm filled with bird kings, fire-wielding warriors, and “bubble-like spirits” called Warawara, the movie is always on the verge of horror.
Take the scene where the Warawara are ascending from the underworld to the surface, each one destined to be the newly minted spirit of a person in the real world. As they rise, they are attacked by pelicans. The woman who comes to their defense shoots fire that also wipes several of the spirits out.
Whether in the Japanese countryside or this fantastical realm, Miyazaki’s vision of childlike wonder is always complicated by a harsh, violent emotional reality. Early in the film, after being bullied at his new school, Mahito takes a rock and smashes it into his head. Blood flows freely, and he refuses to tell anyone what happened.
This is a moment of astonishingly acute character psychology. The story may meander between worlds with an almost unwieldy frequency, but Miyazaki never loses sight of the bizarre pains of childhood.
He also hones in on the anguish of old age. An elderly man Mahito meets in the netherworld could be seen as a stand-in for the director himself: a character reflecting on his magical legacy, looking for someone to entrust it to.
Or maybe Miyazaki is a stand-in for the boy, an old man’s haunted perspective on youth. The early scenes of the firebombing in Tokyo serve as a horrifying rendering of his personal experience growing up during World War II, Mahito’s blue coat a splash of contrasting color running through a sea of fire and ash.
The great thing about this film is that it welcomes both of these readings, and many more. It is a dream-like world prone to nightmares, a funhouse mirror of its director’s aesthetic and thematic obsessions. Why look for a concrete answer when such a rich sprawl is unfolding?
“When you all look at animation, you're always so desperate for an answer,” the movie’s animation director Takeshi Honda said. “But maybe it’s time you think for yourselves.”
There are many paths through The Boy and the Heron. It may end up being 82-year-old Miyazaki’s swan song, or he may keep singing.