In 2013, Hayao Miyazaki sang what many presumed to be his swansong with The Wind Rises. The Japanese director had tricked us before with rumors regarding his retirement, but this time around, things seemed set in stone – The Wind Rises is quite probably Miyazaki’s magnum opus, a film so monumental that one could make peace with the thought that this was the way that the career of Japan’s (if not, the world’s) most famous animation director was to end. 

The Boy and the Heron did not come out of nowhere (it took eight years to be produced), but it did arrive in a somewhat surreptitious way, in the sense that, earlier this summer, the film was released in Japanese cinemas without the slightest promotional campaign. All that was known was that this was Miyazaki’s return, which was more than enough to fill cinemas up. 

The Boy and The Heron doesn’t seem like it will be the director’s “new” final film, but there is something in it that gives a feeling of tying up some unfinished knots. All the more so given the fact that, back in 2017, rumors went around that Miyazaki was working on a project that was a thought up as a farewell dedicated to his grandson, to prepare him for the time when he is no longer around. Just as one scene in the film where a magician of sorts is looking for an apprentice to inherit his entire world, The Boy and The Heron has the aura of a film that is made to be left behind.

Miyazaki’s newest animation is perhaps his most autobiographical, as much as a small compendium of the major themes and motifs that have driven him throughout his filmography, from a world plunged into war, to an obsession with the imagery of flight, to fantasy worlds in which children are shown to be the only pure hearts around. The Boy and the Heron starts from Miyazaki’s own memories of a wartime childhood, as young Mahito, like the director himself, is forced to move to the countryside together with his family to escape the relentless bombardment of his hometown. Before they manage to depart, Mahito’s mother dies in a blaze, and his father – incidentally the head of an aircraft factory, the same field in which Miyazaki’s father worked – ends up marrying the boy’s aunt, Natsuko. Unwilling to accept another mother and unable to integrate within a new environment, young master Mahito, as he is called by the house’s retinue of elderly women, is quickly lured by the promises of a talking heron, who magically claims that his mother is still alive, in a mysterious tower on the estate. While initially untrusting of the heron, if not outright annoyed, Mahito ends up having to follow a pregnant Natsuko after she disappears into the tower, hurt by the boy’s behaviour.

Ever since Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) our screens haven’t been so lush – the world that opens up in front of Mahito is luxurious, crowded, and refined to the detail, from the cracking of a fire whip that guards against evil, to floating entities and flocks of birds that seem to burst through the frame. Miyazaki’s return to a fantastical world after the historic realities in The Wind Rises, The Boy and the Heron is a testament to Miyazaki’s visual mastery and his qualities as a world-builder, ever so poignant even at 83 years old. Still, it does feel like the uplifting, playful, picturesque qualities of his previous films has been traded in by a style that does not shy away from the grotesque. Here, maybe more than in any other film, one can see that Miyazaki’s animation is not one that is usually understood as if “for children”, nor is it that glossy and consumerist culture of anime that he has been constantly criticizing. For that matter, Miyazaki’s return is also indicative of a vague persistence of artisanal work in a climate where the Japanese box office has been flooded by franchise, easy-to-market animations like Demon Slayer.

The Boy and the Heron is a fairytale par excellence, with archetypal magical helpers: seven grannies, a fire witch, and a hero that has departed on a formative journey, but it’s a fairytale like those of the European tradition, where the Little Mermaid turns into sea foam, where the bedtime story is interwoven with moralistic tragedy. The fantastic and the sublime moments mingle with the strange and scabrous in Miyazaki’s latest film to a much larger extent than they did, for example, in the disgusting opulence of Spirited Away (2001). At one point, Mahito is almost swallowed up by an endless band of frogs – the animals the boy encounters on his journey are every bit as spectacular as they are disgusting and petty. 

The heron himself is no picturesque grace, far removed from his usual representation in art; he is almost an anti-hero constantly haranguing Mahito, a disgusting clump of feathers with a villainous, Nevermore-esque grin, who later on turns into a petite, and unfriendly little man. The only ones that are perhaps even more grotesque are the pelicans who kill the Warawara, these yet unborn creatures that float towards the skies, waiting to be born into another world. Miyazaki’s choice to depict a pelican burnt by protective fire is perhaps one of the bleakest moments in his entire filmography, even more so when, nearing his death, he meditates on his own crimes and the nature of evil and killing, as an echo of the war that is going on in real life, shown in the film only at its very beginning.

Although the image of Mahito’s blood dripping profusely after having hit himself at the outset of the film may be one of the most graceful in Miyazaki’s entire filmography, The Boy and The Heron is not amongst his best films. Just as the tower of an all-powerful magician is in danger of collapsing at one point, the film itself also wobbles at times, burdened by its weight. The Boy and The Heron seems rushed, moving quickly from one scenery to the other without allowing its audience to take in the legends and laws that govern each new bit of its fantastical reality; motivations are opaque or rash, and we spend much too little time with each of the myriad characters that live in the world within the tower – only on a second viewing can one grasp all the meaning and details, and only then do these characters also become endearing. Even if the going back and forth between the real world and its parallel makes them function as allegories for each other, the fantasy world seems at a disadvantage, and looks less explored and ermetic, despite the extraordinary vibrancy of its image (and in sound, long be praised Joe Hisaishi’s musical fantasy!).And yet to have to watch this film a second time wouldn’t be a hardship – The Boy and the Heron is a different Miyazaki but old and the same one. The rural sereneness of My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Miss Himi as if a collective sum of all the young witches of his films, the selfish children that learn to become courageous heroes, the belligerent people and pompous monarchs of Howl, all of these and many other, are compiled here, like a metacinematic guidebook and a welcoming island of familiarity. If The Wind Rises is the masterpiece Miyazaki channeled all his idealistic strength into, The Boy and the Heron is the key to everything, the dowry he’s passing onto each of us, the film to say that it’s the turn for the next generations to mature. 

It’s as if Miyazaki is ending The Boy and the Heron with the question that is also the last line in the book from which the original japanese title borrows its name from. Kimi-tachi wa dō ikiru ka – and, you, how do you live?

The Boy and the Heron enters Romanian cinemas on the 15th of December.

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.