Master animator Hayao Miyazaki weaves a personal and complex fantasy in The Boy And The Heron. Our review:
Few animators are as capable of creating a sense of weight, volume, mass, or sheer oomph like Hayao Miyazaki. It’s something Pixar’s John Lasseter once commented on – whether it’s a Fiat 500 skittering across a winding road in The Castle Of Cagliostro or a rotund wood spirit lolling around in My Neighbor Totoro, the Japanese animator’s hand-drawn worlds have a physical, tangible quality that is uniquely his own.
This is once again true in The Boy And The Heron, a fantasy drama nominally adapted from a book – Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live – but clearly reshaped to take in elements from Miyazaki’s life and personal experiences.
Like so many fantasies before it, The Boy And The Heron is about a protagonist transitioning from one reality to another. In fact, the world surrounding 12 year-old Mahito (Soma Santoki in the original Japanese language version, which we’re reviewing here) is one in a state of constant chaos and change.
The story begins in 1943, as the familiar home the boy’s used to – the bustling city of Tokyo – becomes a burning hellscape as World War II takes its toll. Reeling from the loss of his mother who was killed in the fire, Mahito is taken into the countryside by his stoic and somewhat distant father, who works at a factory dedicated to building fighter planes.
There, Mahito learns that his father married his late mother’s older sister, Natsuko, who’s already pregnant. Housed in a rambling estate, Mahito feels increasingly estranged from his new life: he spends much of his time alone and is harshly bullied by his classmates at school. Beckoned by a supernatural grey heron (Masaki Suda), Mahito finds himself exploring an old, crumbling tower near his extended family’s estate, and from here, the boy descends ever further into a world of fantasy and dreams.
In many ways, The Boy And The Heron is like a dark mirror image of two of Miyazaki’s most widely loved works, My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away, in that its protagonist retreats from a rural idyll and towards a fantastical reality that reflects his own mental state. In The Boy And The Heron, Mahito is an older and more troubled hero than Totoro’s siblings or Spirited Away’s Chihiro, so it follows that the space he enters is much darker and more unpredictable.
The Heron of the title is a shape-shifting trickster whose allegiance is never certain; seemingly benign creatures like parakeets and cranes can suddenly turn sinister and threatening, and even moments of typical Ghibli-esque wonderment can reveal a harsher edge. Characters have a tendency to shift jarringly from one space to another, and there are times where audiences’ minds might also be racing to catch up with where exactly Miyazaki is taking them next.
All of this serves to make The Boy And The Heron a less approachable work than those films listed above, with its tone closer to 1997’s Princess Mononoke laced with the autobiographical edge of 2013’s The Wind Rises. (Interestingly, those were both films that Miyazaki once said would be his last.)
All the same, the level of craft on display is undeniable: even at the grand age of 82, Miyazaki’s obsessive commitment to detail is astonishing. He employs shimmering, faltering line work and smeared paint to create the illusion of searing heat in that opening Tokyo sequence; unfathomably complex wooden bridges all collapse in on one another in an intricate flurry of splinters in a later action scene; a boat rushes across a seascape as waves roll and foam in its wake. There really are some captivating images here.
Coupled with an understated, piano-led score by Joe Hisaishi, The Boy And The Heron is also one of Miyazaki’s most introspective films. In essence, it’s the portrait of a grieving boy that takes in elements of Dante’s Divine Comedy or the myth of Orpheus, and there are scenes that are likely to disturb youngsters or even older viewers expecting something lighter and more whimsical.
At a time when hand-drawn animation is increasingly the preserve of low-budget television, though, it’s wonderful to see a film as individual and emotionally complex as The Boy And The Heron not only get made, but actually break through at the US box office. In the months after the film was released, Miyazaki – not for the first time – appeared to change his mind about retiring, and is reportedly already planning out his next feature.
Given the sense of life, weight and creative glee emanating from The Boy And The Heron, it’s arguable that he has at least one more great film in him.
The Boy And The Heron is out in UK cinemas on the 26th December.
