The chaotic opening scene in anime maestro Hayao Miyazaki’s autobiographically inspired The Boy and the Heron is as harrowing as anything he’s put on film. The setting is 1943 Tokyo, and the hospital where the mother of 12-year-old Mahito (Santoki) is located is ferociously ablaze. As sirens scream and silhouettes of floating ash drift against a blood red night sky, Mahito frantically rushes from home to the inferno to help extinguish it, only to helplessly witness the building collapse upon those inside. Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli crew execute this breathless introduction with bravura, capturing the moment’s physical adrenaline and panicked emotion through near-expressionistic animation paced like a furiously beating heart. It’s a gut-punching overture for a film that, strangely enough, becomes more cerebrally impenetrable as it journeys deeper and deeper into a fantasia only the great Miyazaki could imagine. But wow! What a beginning.
The story in Miyazaki’s screenplay begins in linear fashion after a still-grieving Mahito and his take-charge father (Takuya Kimura) move to a fairy-tale-like cottage in the Japanese countryside a year following the boy’s mother’s death. Mahito grows more despondent after meeting (without any forewarning) his new pregnant stepmother, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura); indeed, he’s visibly terrified by her invitation to touch her baby bump. (The fact that she’s his deceased mother’s look-alike younger sister complicates his feelings all the more.) Ominously, a gray heron who greeted his arrival at the country house becomes more determined to interact with Mahito, particularly after the increasingly depressed teenager uses a rock to inflict a serious head wound upon himself after being bullied at school. This kid is pretty messed up.
But once the pesky bird is revealed to be a humanoid (the human teeth and gums protruding from its elongated beak are grotesquely creepy), the unlikely pair soon embark on a surreal adventure after entering a portal on the estate’s grounds in search of a missing Natsuko. Going down the rabbit hole to an underworld wonderland where dream logic refracts reality, the two Candides encounter creatures more fantastic than the heron-man himself: renegade pelicans doomed to die; giant green parakeets with a taste for fascism and human flesh; a young woman who possesses literal firepower; and the cuddly warawaras, white marshmallowlike beings with stubby appendages and dots for eyes who float upward to earth to become humans upon maturation. Again, it’s all very Miyazaki, visually familiar and yet still capable of commanding a sense of awe.
The continuity in the narrative, however, increasingly wobbles to the degree that any coherent recitation of the plot in the film’s later section is challenging, if not impossible. And what it all means is unclear, absent any “there’s no place like home” homily in the end. Maybe the film is simply a fanciful manifestation of one person’s healing passage through a landscape of grief and trauma. But there is little doubt that The Boy and the Heron is one of the Japanese auteur’s most cinematic feature-length films – maybe the most cinematic — in his relatively limited oeuvre. At times, it is an exquisite thing to experience. The 82-year-old Miyazaki has publicly stated this is his last film, but he has said that twice before in the past. Let’s hope he’s fibbing once again.
This article appears in Gift Guide 2023.
