In the months since the winter release of The Boy and the Heron (2023), the following events have clarified the meaning and depth of this inscrutable film in my mind: The Megalopolis (2024) trailer, the Supreme Court’s sweeping theft of federal power, The Gladiator 2 (2024) trailer, Biden’s debate debacle and refusal to withdraw, Chris Hemsworth’s (Thor; Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) Dementus shouting “THERE IS NO HOPE,” a young man sat for Longlegs (2024) calling his mother in tears to tell her Trump was shot, the magic trick of A Quiet Place: Day One (2024), and Vice President Harris finally taking the wheel from President Biden. This channel flipping between films about dying empires and the seeming death of ours has drawn my attention to the fact that The Boy and the Heron, now out on 4K UHD, is the first film where Hayao Miyazaki interrogates the decline of an empire.
Warning: Spoilers abound for The Boy and the Heron.
He explores the consequences of empires attempting to rise in The Wind Rises (2013), Porco Roso (1992), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Nausicaa Valley of the Wind (1984), and even Castle in the Sky (1986), if you assume a larger federation behind the villainous Muska. One of his central themes, as used by many Japanese filmmakers of his era and inclination, is the sudden death of the Japanese Empire during WW2. But in his work, it has often expressed itself in the damage that desiring, preparing, and waging a war of expansion caused to individuals and nature, not in the actual end of Japan’s political power. Inside the steelbook for his first masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), a 2012 interview with Studio Ghibli Producer Toshio Suzuki (Spirited Away; My Neighbor Totoro) includes the lines “It’s good that Japan lost the war. If Japan had won, it would have become a really awful country.” But we won, so here we are, and across an ocean, Hayao Miyazaki has won his own war. He has built his empire off of interrogating the change that occurred when the empire of his fathers died in the blink of eye. At the age of 83, his own self-reflection has caused him to collide with the more historically common experience of a slow decline. Totoro plushies in every chain bookstore, another Oscar, and an American rep-screening circuit with no peer. Ghibli won, and Miyazaki has been wondering, has that made him a really awful country?
“Move, before the buried wake”
Always discussed for his whimsy and wonder, Miyazaki is an underrated surrealist, foregrounding in his oeuvre a man with a pig’s face, a fish with a girl’s face, a heron with a man inside, and, metaphorically, two men that are also one, battling for a kingdom that is also their lifetime. The magical world of The Boy and the Heron is, more than any other film, a country of himself. He is the granduncle who left a book unfinished, and the young boy, Mahito, is also his own little Sammy Fableman, an abstraction of his boyhood.
Director Hayao Miyazaki. Photo credit: Nicolas Guérin. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films. © 2023 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli.
We can begin to unravel this abstraction on the day his mother dies in the American firebombing of Japan. Some time afterwards, we follow him as he and his father flee to his mother’s childhood estate, where he meets his pregnant aunt, who is also his new stepmother, and he encounters a talking heron that invites him to enter the magical tower ruled by his mysterious great uncle. The heron tempts him first with the idea of his mother being somehow alive, which he rejects, but the disappearance of his step-mother spurs him to action.
“It’s like staring at his mother.”
Miyazaki’s mother, of course, didn’t die in that fire. You can see parts of her real story in My Neighbor Totoro and reflected in The Wind Rises as a woman battling against tuberculosis. While she may have lived until 1983, trauma and death changes people. Time changes people. My mother who raised me is not the mother who is raising my 9-years-younger sisters. And the mother who will raise Mahito’s brother is not the woman who raised him. The trope of the aunt-step-mom is another layer of abstraction through which Miyazaki can tell the story of his relationship to a mother who almost died. That day he meets his new mother, his former aunt, and holds his hand to her pregnant belly, a fresh wedding band on her finger presses against the top of his hand. He is shocked by the baby, and the moment. His family is new and different, but, at a glance, it looks the same. But it’s different. Just like Miyazaki’s Japan became, and just like his studio.
The work of Miyazaki and those whose works he nurtured bear the scar of his mother’s hospital visits. Hiromasa Yonebayashi (The Secret World of Arriety; Mary and the Witch’s Flower) is one of the more successful directors to work under the Ghibli label, yet when he adapted a novel for the studio, he wrote When Marnie Was There (2014), which also sees a mournful protagonist encounter a time-traveling, child version of their dead mother, just like this final work from Miyazaki. When writing The Fablemans (2012), Steven Spielberg (A.I. Artificial Intelligence; Close Encounters of the Third Kind) changed the name of his family in order to create a distancing mechanism between himself, the story, and the audience. But the twisting of his mother’s story into a more dramatic event is not simply a distancing tactic from Miyazaki, but a confession.
To continue the Fablemans comparison for a few more lines, that film centers on a daring admission from one of the most famous artists on Earth that he had lied to us for decades (as is his right) about the central event of his artistic and personal life, his parent’s divorce. In The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki quietly makes a similar confession, but turns it into an indictment of himself and those who use myth-making to garner power. When Mahito arrives at the top of his granduncle’s tower, he is shown two objects, a tower of children’s building blocks and a rock. We’ve seen this rock before, when Mahito joined his new school. It’s the most upsetting, visceral-reaction-eliciting scene of the film. After getting into a fight on the way home from school, the barely scratched Mahito picks up a rock and hits himself in the side of the head. He cannot go back to school because he’ll be bullied, but he’s not wounded enough to convince his father. So he makes the tale a little taller, and sacrifices self-harm at the altar of his ambition.
This is the original sin at the heart of The Boy and the Heron. Whether you want to interpret this as a Spielburgian confession about something that literally happened, or if you want to see it as his guilt over using his mother’s fight with TB in Totoro, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the truth about the act of lying inherent at the center of filmmaking and myth-making. Empires are built on carefully pruned myths told to younger generations, and Miyazaki wrestles with how he arrived at this victorious moment. He paints himself as a teller of double-edged tales, 13 building blocks for his 13 major fibs (12 feature films and a short film). In fact, the heron only appears to Mahito after his first tall tale, the tale of the school yard bullies.
“Well, Miyazaki was a bit different this time.” – Producer Toshio Suzuki.
In the extras for this film, Producer Toshio Suzuki talks at length about the heron. He talks about realizing that the speech pattern of the Japanese voice actor Masaki Suda (Drowning Love; Fireworks) was based on his own way of speaking, and the conversations between Mahito and the heron mirror his with Miyazaki. A big win for the subs > dub camp, no matter how gloriously insane Robert Pattinson’s (The Batman; Tenet) voice performance is in the English dub. Also mentioned is that the heron is real, that leading up to the film’s inception, a heron had begun visiting Miyazaki’s house, and that Miyazaki thought it reminded him of Suzuki. Once Mahito tells his first tall tale, he meets his producer, the heron of his adulthood, who guides his inner child. Inside the fantastic country of himself, his old maid still walks beside him in her prime, and his older self berates him and wishes in vain to shape him, in the voice of his forefathers. The cycle of history talks to itself when generations end and the new begins.
Granduncle voiced by Shohei Hino/Mark Hamill in THE BOY AND THE HERON. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films. © 2023 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli.
“I cannot keep this tower standing”
Instead of an essay or interview, the disc’s pamphlet gives us an incredible insight into Miyzaki’s intentions, his production proposal for the film, transcribed from an email he sent to his producers. It’s an amazing document, and too long to include here (buy the disc to read it in full), but here are some excerpts worth discussing:
“There’s nothing more pathetic than telling the world you’ll retire because of your age, then making yet another comeback. Is it truly possible to accept how pathetic that is and do it anyway? Doesn’t an elderly person deluding themself that they’re still capable despite their geriatric forgetfulness prove that they’re past their best? You bet it does.”
After discussing the practicalities of age, he says:
“What state will the world and minds of viewers be in when they greet our film? Surely our current age, indistinctly drifting, indefinable, and indiscernible, is reaching its end? Isn’t the world as a whole in a state of flux?”
He ends with discussing the possibility of an international war, and answering the moment with a Totoro 2 or a war film. But over the course of the film’s production, COVID, and the death of his animation mentor Ōtsuka Yasuo (Lupin the Third: Mystery of Mamo; Panda! Go Panda!) refined the film’s plot to the one we have today, informed largely by his relationship to Ghibli the studio and Ghibli the museum.
The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan, was crucial to the development of the film’s production team. Supervising animator Takeshita Honda talks here about how he joined Ghibli during the last 3 months of production on Ponyo (2008), but it was while working on the museum-exclusive short film Boro and the Caterpillar (2018) that Miyazaki asked him to work on The Boy and the Heron. Honda was committed to another film and declined. Miyazaki replied “I do not have time” and said that no one in the Miyazaki family had lived to the age of 80. He was 75. He thought he only had two or three years left. The film took seven. He is now 83 years old, and insists he has one more in him.
Composer Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away; Howl’s Moving Castle) also sits down in an interview for the film’s extras, where he talks about writing an annual birthday song for Miyazaki for broadcasting in the museum. For this one, Miyazaki came to hear his gift at Hisaishi’s studio, his first time coming to Hisaishi instead of Hisaishi coming to him. After hearing the birthday song, Miyazaki made a phone call and said the song “Ask Me Why” would be the film’s main musical motif. Melancholic, twisting, and final, the song perfectly evokes the new attitude Hisaishi says Miyzaki operated with while making this film, “I leave the rest to you.”
In his interview, Honda talks about how when Ghibli the studio was dispersing at the end of The Wind Rises, Miyazaki felt so responsible for the animators that he kept giving them storyboards to work on past completion so he could keep paying them. There are two sets of birds that populate the country of Miyazaki in The Boy and the Heron: A swarm of pelicans trying to force their way into the land of the dead and eating the souls of the living yet to be born, and the starving parakeets, whose king demands control of the kingdom from Miyazaki. The granduncle’s paramount concern is finding a worthy new ruler for these groups of birds. What future should Miyazaki leave Ghibli with?
Mahito Maki voiced by Soma Santoki/Luca Padovan in THE BOY AND THE HERON. Photo courtesy of GKIDS Films. © 2023 Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli.
“Mahito, save me!”
The easiest reading of the film one could make is that it is largely about how Miyazaki’s son, Goro (From Up on Poppy Hill; Earwig and the Witch), sucks. It’s a bad, mean-hearted reading, but placing Goro, who joked at Cannes that “Everything will be easier for me when my father and Suzuki-san are dead,” into the role of the mutinous Parakeet King is an easy layup, as is the reading that the Parakeet King’s anger is an abstraction of accusations that Miyazaki and Suzuki worked Whisper of the Heart’s (1995) director Yoshifumi Kondo to death. However, I think it’s even simpler than that. The Parakeet King is the desire of anyone, Goro, merchandising executives, museum curators, or producers, to lay out a plan for Ghibli after Miyazaki passes. Miyazaki only wants Miyazaki to lead Ghibli, even while he worries about how these parakeets, the animators, will eat. But his younger self cannot and will not lead the future, nor can he change the foundation his younger self built, so the kingdom will crumble, and the parakeets and pelicans will have to fend for themselves.
“What a noble pelican he was.”
The most magical scene of The Boy and the Heron is the ascension of the adorable Warawara to the realm of the living, a wonderful moment upsettingly cut short by the arrival of a flock of hungry pelicans and their enemy, the fire mage Lady Himi. We’ve met the pelicans before, when they hungrily tried to force their way into the land of the dead in Miyazaki’s country. During the ascension, we receive a crucial lesson about the creative process as Lady Himi burns up several of the Warawara in order to protect the rest from the pelicans. The Warawara and the dead represent the same thing, Miyazaki’s ideas for stories, those yet to be born and those who lived out their time. If the parakeet are the animators, we are the pelicans, brought into his realm to be fed, but we cannot be left to choose when or what to feed on. He worries that he’s hurt them, like Alan Moore (Swamp Thing; The Watchmen) worries he destroyed a generation of young male comic book readers. Meanwhile, the audience is banging on the gates, desperate to raid his past and his unfinished ideas.
”That thing wasn’t built by people, I can promise you that”
Miyazaki is begging his younger self to show him how to make one more movie and fix a lifetime of mistakes at the same time, but he also knows that he is not and has never been enough. The tower that is his dominion was built on top of a miracle that fell from the sky. Building around it cost him people, but the granduncle got it done, and got lost in it. The success of any film is a miracle, and the empire-building success of Ghibli’s early films has happened only 1-2 times in cinematic history. The original title of this film was How Do You Live?, which is a question that remains in the film in the form of a book Mahito’s mother leaves for her son. A question left noticeably unaddressed in a traditional sense in the film. But Honda had a theory.
Honda calls the film Miyazaki’s message “to young people in Mahito’s words. When the granduncle asks Mahito to carry out his work, he refuses.
‘You’ll be able to make this world more harmonious than I could.’ Says the granduncle.
‘Those aren’t made of wood. They look like gravestones. I can sense their malice.’
I (Honda) felt like Miyazaki was putting his personal feelings into those lines.”
This line returns us to the central theme of this film, how an empire slowly dies.
In 2023, we experienced a year in film all about how parents hand down the reins of responsibility and agency to their children, which I called The Paternal Tide. I asked “As generations change, what does each generation owe the other?” We owe each other grace and a chance, but those two things are not always given.
We’re farther along into this crashing wave now as the last of the Baby Boomers retire and Millennials and GenX take over the political and corporate landscape. Just a few weeks ago, we witnessed a stunning example of this wave as President Biden stepped down from the Democratic ticket and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. But, by all reports, he didn’t do it willingly. After months of pressure from the uncommitted primary voters, anti-genocide protestors, and historically low approval ratings, it took other Baby Boomers like Nancy Pelosi working behind the scenes to force him to hand over the metaphorical driver’s license. At the end of empires, political transgression leads to infighting and a disruption of the changing of powers. That transgression, often, is a refusal to change course in the form of valorizing all aspects of the present and past as unassailable, even as the mistakes made hurt the present more and more. “Doesn’t an elderly person deluding themself that they’re still capable despite their geriatric forgetfulness, prove that they’re past their best? You bet it does,” Miyazaki wrote about a guy just making a movie. Dying empires and leaders of dying empires try to pass off gravestones as building blocks, because they fear their own.
But change must happen. The pelicans must exit the theater, and the past must return to the past. Do we stop loving things just because they become different than they once were? No. We may unravel new feelings to place next to that love, but that love is still there. Patriotism, fandom, loyalty, imagination, they are all the results of tales told. When the sun sets, we often speak the idealism of our youth or idealize the present course. But neither the past nor present hold our best days. Wonder, freedom, and mystery lie in the sunrises yet to come. As my favorite line in the masterpiece The Boy and the Heron goes, “This world that we’re in, will last one more day.”
The Boy and the Heron Special Features:
4K UHD
- In Dolby Vision (HDR-10 Compatible)
- Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 Surround English, DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 Surround Japanese, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Spanish, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround English AD
Blu-ray
- Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 Surround English, DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 Surround Japanese, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Spanish, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround English AD
- Interview with Composer Joe Hisaishi
- Interview with Producer Toshio Suzuki
- Interview with Animation Supervisor Takeshi Honda
- Drawing with Takeshi Honda
- Storyboard Reel
- Spinning Globe Music Video
- Teasers & Trailers
Available on digital June 25th, 2024.
Available on 4K UHD Blu-ray Combo and limited edition 4K UHD Blu-ray Combo Steelbook July 9th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official GKIDS Films The Boy and the Heron webpage.
To purchase, head to the official Shout! Studios The Boy and the Heron webpage.
Final Score: 5 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
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