This review contains allusions to SPOILERS. The press screening was in the Japanese vocal track.
Ten years ago, Hayao Miyazaki retired. The legendary Japanese animation director, co-founder of the world-renowned Studio Ghibli, and head creative on at least half-dozen of the greatest animated films ever made, had talked up retirement several times before 2013, but this time it was going to stick. There were “things [he] always wanted to do, but [don’t] involve animation,” that he felt his increasing years (72 at the time) were slowing down his productivity to a detrimental degree, that “if [I] said I wanted to [continue], I would sound like an old man saying something foolish”.
He would exit at the top of his game. The Wind Rises being a beautifully fitting epitaph about a brilliant artist reckoning with how the world (and particularly his country) corrupts and misappropriates his art and creativity for its own wicked ends to leave his legacy twisting in the wind – just with said artist being WWII Japanese aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi; one gets the impression Christopher Nolan was taking notes for Oppenheimer. As a farewell, both for the meta-text parallels with his own life and for the film being engaging without that baggage, Miyazaki couldn’t have left on a better note.
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Unsurprisingly, his ‘retirement’ wouldn’t last. The Terry Funk of animation would be back making an all-CGI short for the Studio Ghibli museum within two years of that announcement, floating the idea of an entirely new hand-drawn feature a year into that short’s production, and officially starting work on said new feature by early 2017. Despite pitching The Boy and the Heron as his absolute definitive final film – the press notes even feature some comments from Miyazaki which start “there’s nothing more pathetic than telling the world you’ll retire because of your age, then making yet another comeback…” – he’s apparently back at Ghibli offices every single day working on ideas for a new film. Hayao Miyazaki is both incapable of letting himself rest yet also growing ever-more aware of and haunted by his encroaching age and what people will think of him when he’s gone.
You may argue that’s a lot of supposition to charge against the man, but it’s all laid bare in both The Wind Rises and now The Boy and the Heron. Even more so than Wind, Heron feels like an artist trying to express both their life and career in some kind of grand definitive statement, like it may truly be the last work they manage to complete. Much of the character details in the early-going are autobiographical, a climactic meeting between our protagonist Mahito (Soma Santoki) and the architect of the world he’s been pulled into carries the subtextual weight of Miyazaki trying to converse with multiple generations of his family at once, and the film at large is a catalogue of Miyazaki’s greatest hits and storytelling standbys.
Mahito is the classic fundamentally-decent but bullish young protagonist nursing parental angst – a mother who died in a hospital blaze he somehow blames himself for; a father who is often emotionally and physically distant from him due to being overly-preoccupied with work; and a new stepmother, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura) the sister of Mahito’s mother, who so closely resembles her as to inadvertently function as an ever-present reminder of what has been lost. The trio have moved away from WWII Tokyo to the countryside where Mahito disassociates from everything and everyone due to his grief and survivor’s guilt, taunted by a mysterious grey heron (Masaki Suda) who keeps calling out to him and insisting his mother is still alive. When Natsuko, in the midst of a fever, wanders off to a mysterious ruined tower nearby, Mahito sets off to rescue her and his supposedly-alive mother, being, with the heron’s dubious help, thrust into a magical fantasy world which parallels his own in more ways than one.
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Classic Miyazaki, in other words. Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, et al can be spotted in that premise even before you start looking at individual details. A complicated relationship with Japan’s perception of the military? Check, both in the real world and in the fantasy world with a human-eating parakeet regiment looking for greater control. An opportunity for our protagonist to spend time with surrogate family figures to help them get over their trauma? Check in the form of the mysterious fire-giving Lady Himi (Aimyon) who may be the key to rescuing Natsuko. A childlike adoration of food and flying, rendered via sumptuous animation which is all about communicating the joy in both acts? Of course. There’s even an equivalent to My Neighbor Totoro’s susuwatari in the warawara, adorable bubble-esque spirits that roll around in a collective mass and rise to the sky in DNA-like strands.
And yet, for all the Miyazaki signifiers and weighty introspective themes in line with his prior works… something is missing from The Boy and the Heron. Both times that I’ve been able to attend press screenings of the film, I found myself ever-waiting for that moment when the classic transcendental magic of a Hayao Miyazaki story would hit. Both times, I could see what he was aiming to accomplish with the film, the exact emotions he was trying to stir, the self-reflexive nature of the narrative’s meta-text, where a slightly wayward journey was supposed to click together and unleash a torrent of feeling… Both times, that moment never arrived. The magic never hit.
To some degree, and even though it’s an intentional creative choice part of the story’s meta-textual interrogation of its writer-director’s life and career, Miyazaki choosing to play the hits shines a further light on the fact that Heron doesn’t fully work. His storytelling here feels much more clipped and inelegant than in prior features, the typical contemplative pacing giving way in the second-half to scenarios and characters who are rocketed through like a roller-coaster without time to properly develop or make a larger impression. I fully admit that there could be elements and symbolism flying well over my head due to cultural differences, but a lot of those big thesis-statement centrepieces to me lacked the connective tissue and groundwork to soar like they’re clearly aiming for.
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The animation is technically gorgeous as ever; psychedelic in its usage of off-model geography, blended colours, and eventual crumbling to dust as an ordered world falls to ruin. Earlier segments fleetingly covering Mahito’s trauma over the fire which claimed his mother have a ghostly haunting to them, particularly with how bystanders are depicted as detail-free sketches rather than people. The character and creature designs in the alternate world are eye-catching, frequently uncanny in ways that unsettle but never repulse – the heron, in all of its forms, is a masterclass in how to walk this tightrope; slasher-teeth, detailed tongue which can often be mistaken for or double as a nose, human head which contorts like an Adams apple, and all.
Despite those, however, Heron is frequently lacking in breath-stealing, spellbinding, jaw-dropping images which stick out long after viewing. The sort of imagery that can send a viewer right back to feelings and moments they were a part of. The ones laced with meaning and ‘hang it in the Louvre’ artistry. The layout and boarding rarely amaze and dazzle like classic Studio Ghibli, even whilst the technical side of the animation continues to uphold the high hand-drawn standards of their history. Heron is not a bad film to look at, nor a boring one, nor an underwhelming one, not by any conceivable metric. But it never quite visually soars or surprises with the regularity its director was once so adept at.
Lest I come off as being too much of a downer, I want to stress that The Boy and the Heron has a lot of charm. The characters are enjoyable to watch, even if they lack the dimension of their forebearers. The overall feel and vibe of the film are still unmistakably Ghibli and Miyazaki, something that other filmmakers have been attempting to emulate for decades (and will continue to do so) but never properly replicated. Like all the master’s great works, there’s a tonne of symbolism and metaphor going on under the service of an engaging psychedelic tale which I’m sure shall be decoded and discussed for months to come. Voice acting is strong, the sparsely-utilised score is often haunting, and it really is comforting to slide back into a new Hayao Miyazaki world after so long of it seeming like we wouldn’t get any more.
In a way, I hope that more time, a distancing from the dual burdens of this being both a ‘coming out of retirement’ movie and a ‘potential final for realsies’ movie, will cause my feelings towards The Boy and the Heron to improve. The weight of expectation, particularly when it comes after one of the most perfect full stops an artist could ever hope to pen for their career, is too immense to act like it doesn’t thumb the scale somewhat. It is a good, solid movie I enjoyed watching. It just, for some somewhat ineffable reason, never fully becomes a great one.
The Boy and the Heron is out in cinemas from 26th December. For more information, see theboyandtheheronfilm.com
