The Boy and the Heron by Hayao Miyazaki

The Boy and the Heron

In Japan, the prodigious master of animation Hayao Miyazaki is considered a living god, while around the world his work has found success with both critics and public. In 2013, Miyazaki announced his last feature film, The Wind Rises. But the master has returned.

 The Boy and the Heron tells the story of Mahito, a twelve-year-old boy who finds himself pushed towards adulthood: the death of his mother and the sudden marriage of his father to a woman, almost identical to his mother. To offer him some psychological relief, his father takes Mahito to the countryside. There, Mahito becomes fascinated by a mysterious abandoned tower, forbidden to enter, but the boy breaks the interdiction.

It is the beginning of a journey that has multiple levels. An expedition in one place, yet between infinite places, worlds, universes, parallel and simultaneous, between the dead and the living, in turn similar and synchronised, or if you prefer, double and triple, or even a single thing that splits into several parts. And in this ride of kaleidoscopic worlds to fully live you have to try to die first.

This film is a sort of continuation of The Wind Rises. We move from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second (in Miyazaki's last two feature films the modern wars in fact replace the archaic-mythological ones), and in both films we are far from heroism - which the director tends to reserve for female protagonists - since Jiro, the aeronautical engineer protagonist of The Wind Rises, was short-sighted to the point of not seeing the death his creations brought, but only the poetry of forms. In The Boy and the Heron, we are at the achievement of the reversibility or instability of things, a constant in Miyazaki's cinema.

It is at the same time a deep, human, intimate and distant exploration.

The first forty minutes of the film proceed at gentle pace, slowly building the tempo. This heightens the plunge into the realm of fantasy where the screen teems with extraordinary characters and landscapes, from fluffy little creatures to ferocious, human-sized parakeets. Most outstanding of all is an odd wizard who plays a key role in the existence of this fantasy world. 

Miyazaki is often compared to Walt Disney, which is both helpful and unhelpful. Like Disney, he has produced a string of much-loved, and much-merchandised, animated classics, bursting with colour and imagination. His movies are some of the highest grossing ever made in Japan, and his characters are household names, especially Totoro, the lovable monster at the heart of his 1988 favourite My Neighbour Totoro. But there are huge differences between the two production companies.

Ghibli’s stories typically concern the restoration of a lost harmony. They work at a deeper level than vanquishing of the monster or the rescuing of the princess. There is also a difference in method. Compare Disney’s industrial production where hundreds of animators contribute to the output, to Ghibli where seventy per cent of the drawings are done by Miyazaki's own hand.

Miyazaki’s technique is resolutely old school. As well as sketching out the guiding concepts and characters, he personally draws or checks the other primary images. If he doesn’t like what he sees, he’ll often rub them out and redraw them himself. It is a laborious, time-consuming task. A two-hour movie entails more than 170,000 images, most of them made by Miyazaki and his very close collaborators.

A Miyazaki’s movie stands strong in the animation world with its unique artistic identity, like a sculpture or a painting, like Mona Lisa, that will stand the test of time. Hardly surprising, the theme of mentorship emerges in The Boy and the Heron—as the wizard tells Mahito, “I have grown old, I seek a successor. Will you continue my work?”.

Throughout the film there are clear references to Miyazaki’s previous films; from the Mystery of the House calling upon my Neighbour Totoro; to the gateway into the Underworld - Spirited Away; The Warawara were a clear nod to Princess Mononoke and many more, but despite the film being almost a homage to his former works, there is a marvellous new world on view.

Miyazaki is a master of the imagination. He still amazes. He still achieves the extraordinary. The sheer magic of his imagination is just as strong as it was at the beginning of his career. It is a spectacular animated unique origami.