The Boy and the Heron
or, how do you live; or, Prospero gave unto us
What’s perhaps most interesting about The Boy and the Heron to me is that Hayao Miyazaki is 83 and still innovating even while he remains defiantly in the 20th Century tradition of hand drawn animation.
Early on, we see our protagonist, Mahito, running through Tokyo to attempt to save his mother from a fire at the hospital she works at. Rather than the traditional Miyazaki style of animation, the lines begin to blur and bend and we lose the realism, the defined figures we all know so well. Even before we’ve entered the fantastic in this journey, we’re already experiencing the unreality of real life.
When I was sixteen, I fell 50 feet and managed to survive by pure chance, and then I spent the weekend in a hospital. Didn’t have a concussion or anything wrong except a broken clavicle. I bring this up because my memories of the fall are nonexistent and the memories of the moments preceding the fall also essentially don’t exist. Even most of that weekend is a blur that may as well not have happened, except for this calcified bump right next to my left shoulder.
Mahito losing his mother blurs and burns his own memory of that night. The most real thing that has happened in his life, and yet it becomes unreal. The overwhelming reality of it shatters his own personal reality.
Thus and so, we grow up.
The long journey from Tokyo to his new stepmother’s family estate (she’s also, curiously, his dead mother’s sister, already pregnant with his half-sibling) where she forces a level of intimacy that he doesn’t feel, which includes making him feel her pregnant belly when his fetal sibling kicks.
Once there, the most striking moment of unreality and disequilibrium happens when he sees, down the hall, the caretakers investigating his trunk full of his belongings.
There’s something strangely feral about their appearance in this scene that reminded me of Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko, which is a movie full of Tanuki.
There’s something unnerving and unreal about these old woman who live on the estate as caretakers, at least on first meeting. And we must understand that we’re experiencing them through Mahito, who is exhausted from the long journey, possibly still hazy from the knowledge that his nation is at war, that his mother is dead, that his aunt is his new mother and she’s already pregnant.
Miyazaki is working at several levels throughout this whole movie. He’s at his most intertextual and referential while also doing something unlike what he’s done before while also giving us his most autobiographical story.
It’s also, in some ways, his most shocking.
Miyazaki’s movies are often filled with or at least textured by the fantastic, from Princess Mononoke to Porco Rosso, but here, with The Boy and the Heron, he’s using fantasy in a new way.
Perhaps the most similar movie is Spirited Away, where Chihiro tumbles into a fantasy world purely on accident. In The Boy and the Heron, it’s the fantasy world that comes hunting Mahito.
The titular Heron arrives, hunting him, calling for him, and brings chaos with him. As well as waves of magic.
When he first speaks to Mahito, croaking out his words, that Mahito’s mother waits for him, I found it strangely chilling. To taunt a child with the death of his mother is such a wicked and perverse thing to do, it took me time to grapple with what Miyazaki was doing here.
For it is a cruelty and Miyazaki may be brutal but he has never before been cruel.
Terrifying in a way that I’ve never felt from a Miyazaki movie. It’s a bizarre and confounding moment. The kind of moment Miyazaki has never really gone for, even when the fantastic breaks reality’s veneer.
Chihiro, for example, just goes along with the fantasy world she’s stumbled into. Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle also accepts the magical infiltrating her life with an English or Midwestern stoicism. Mei and Satsuki from My Neighbor Totoro and Sosuke from Ponyo have the wide-eyed childhood embrace and expectation of the magical.
Which keeps the fantastical from being frightening.
But here, with this croaking heron hunting and haunting Mahito, we feel the reality breaking terror that our eleven year old protagonist feels. And then, rooted to the spot at the shore, a wave of toads cover him and we fear.
Miyazaki is breaking all the rules, and we’ve barely got here.
For a moment, I believed that he’d be taken. That the heron was not a companion but an antagonist. And, in truth, he’s kind of both. As we watch their relationship move past this initial moment, there’s a brutality to their friendship. A coarseness that chafes at your hands, at your eyes, at your heart.
But the toads swallowing Mahito also recalls the gooification of Howl. A reminiscence. An echo. Not exactly the same, but a conjuring.
And if this is Miyazaki’s final work, perhaps he’s the Prospero at the heart of this, Mahito’s great-granduncle who built the tower around a fallen meteor.
Mahito is saved from the Heron, from the toads, by a piercing arrow shot by his aunt, his new mother, which breaks the spell.
Then there’s the self-inflicted scar. Mahito smashes his own head with a rock after getting into fights, presumably over class and his outsiderness, which leaves him concussed.
The scar as reminder. As spell. A reminder of who Mahito is, even when the world begins to bend and blur around him.
Entering the tower built by his great-granduncle does break what remains of reality. And this time it’s not the Heron calling him, but the disappearance of his aunt, his new mother, who seems ensorcelled as she leaves the estate to enter the woods.
In my view, it’s her granduncle who pulls her towards him, for he needs an heir, and the heir must be of his bloodline.
A most unlike Miyazaki desire if I’ve ever heard one, especially given the sale of Studio Ghibli to Nippon TV after Miyazaki refused to sell the studio to his own son, Goro.
Inside the tower, Mahito meets his own mother, now a teenager, and he meets one of the estate’s caretakers, now a much younger woman. Most importantly, within the tower the world stops following rational logic and causality and sequentiality and begins following the logic of Play.
Rarely have any works attempted this shift and it’s even rarer for it to work, because of the senselessness of it all. Ponyo waves its hands in this direction, but there’s still a magical understanding of balance and nature there, whereas in The Boy and the Heron we let go completely of any sense of space and time and so on.
It borders Alice and Wonderland, which veers too hard into nonsense, but it also borders the surreal dream logic of something like Inception, which is much more often employed when reality begins to break down.
The Boy and the Heron—well, it defies explanation, in a way. I could sit here and try to explain what I mean by the logic of Play but perhaps the best way to understand is to watch a handful of kids under 6 years old playing for twenty minutes. There’s a rhythm and flow. You feel it. You cannot grasp it, cannot inject yourself into it without breaking what is beautiful there.
We are cursed to age and lose so much magic.
And perhaps the only way to hold onto that magic, that ethereal lightness, that unbridled openness, is to spend time with children, to let their reality expunging light scorch your soul, marking you forever as a totem that once belonged to their world, to their play, to their imagination and world, to the reality they forged haphazardly, accidentally, yet willfully, powered into existence by their thrumming makebelieve engine.
I sat there dazzled, enraptured, the world sliding around and through me, wholly capturing me, captivating me, howling through me, and I gave into that world, that Play, and allowed myself to become a thrumming engine along with all the palpitating hearts thrumming in the chests around me, we all building this world together, bathed in Miyazaki’s hand drawn imagery, and I was struck dumb when Mahito tried to free his aunt, his new mother, from the cage of the birthing room where those paper birds recalled both Spirited Away but most of all the moment in Princess Mononoke when San, the wolf princess, tries to free Lord Okkoto, the blind boar god, from the curse enflaming him and his people towards suicide, towards a self-inflicted genocide, and I gasped, suddenly alone in that packed theatre, elbow to elbow with my cowriter, and the hooks within me, that I hadn’t noticed, all pulled at once when Mahito’s mother says goodbye, when his great-granduncle’s tower comes tumbling down, when his father tried to free him, his sword slashing through a maelstrom of enlarged and sentient parakeets, and I lost track of time, of myself, and I tumbled through time, through years, through the versions of me, of ydde, who sat and watched these many Ghibli movies on various beatup couches, on dirty carpets, in dark theatres, sitting at my desk where I wrote a column of every Studio Ghibli movie, but most of all to that very first time, to the first time I ever encountered one of these wonderful, terrifying, beautiful, worldending, lifechanging movies that led me through decades of influence, a decade of desolation, and I was again ten years old, my mouth agape, agapē—
The Boy and the Heron may be the end or it may be a new beginning for an artist in his final years. It’s not perfect. In some ways, certain aspects are clumsier and certain things never entirely cohere and seem to arise more out of narrative necessity than anything else, but all of these complaints also fold neatly into the logic of Play, with villains and heroes arriving unnoticed, unremarked upon, only to steal the whole game, twist it into a new direction.
Complaints rise and fall and we can embrace them or swat them away like flies, and while the critic’s job is to embrace them, to understand them, to then discard them, I am not merely a critic here but a man who was once a boy surrounded by magic, led by Play, drowning in impossibility, in an everness, an expansiveness, with a heart thrumming, powering an engine of my own making, of a reality that coiled round me, gave shape and definition to the reality I would one day break out of only to stumble onto the hard concrete, the smoggy skies, the plastic beaches of this ruined, corroded world of hate and spite, of terror and infamy.
But we pick ourselves up, cough the plastic from our lungs, and smile at the sunshine smeared across the sky by pollution and hubris as we step over the green grass of December and wonder what this means for us, what it means for our children, for those who come next, and what can be done.
But when we look at their tiny bodies at play, we only hope that they will somehow escape what captured you.
And though, in English, we have The Boy and the Heron, I think the original title is far more appropriate for what Miyazaki is doing, what he’s saying:
How Do You Live?
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Some free books for your trouble:
Not well enough right not to be articulate, but still wanted to say I greatly appreciated that as it is a film that moved me on what felt like a deep, almost pre-verbal level, while simultaneously recognising all of its jagged imperfections - I don't think I'd have it any other way though, I bit like Twin Peaks: The Return or other examples of a great artist's late style.
The impression I got - and maybe I'm wrong about this - was that the fantasy in the movie was the main characters (Mahito and Natsuko his stepmother) who refused the hero's journeys of their lives. Mahito hit himself with a rock so he wouldn't have to go to school or build a new life here or a relationship with his stepmother. Natsuko ran away toward the end of her pregnancy so she wouldn't have the be the lady of the house. Running away from reality, they ran into a fantasy world, as in Pan's Labyrinth.