The Boy and the Heron review: Miyazaki's 'last' film is a masterpiece (2024)

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The Boy and the Heron review: Miyazaki's 'last' film is a masterpiece (1)

Hayao Miyazaki's first film in a decade has played at the Toronto International Film Festival, and is his "most expansive and magisterial", writes Caryn James.

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Hayao Miyazaki is one of the great masters of cinema, whose work happens to be animated, in hand-drawn films of exquisite delicacy and beauty. They are grounded by thoroughly believable young heroes and heroines who often find themselves in otherworldly landscapes, like the girl in Spirited Away (2001), who wanders into a country of ghosts, or the young woman in Howl's Moving Castle (2004), with its house that floats through time and space.

The Boy and the Heron, the 82-year-old Miyazaki's first film in a decade, amounts to a summing up of many strands of his long career, with a magical castle, forays into the spirit world and the weighty reality of World War Two. Told through the eyes of a boy named Mahito, whose journey takes him from a bombing in wartime Tokyo to a land where he is menaced by pink parakeets bigger than he is, this may be Miyazaki's most expansive and magisterial film. If it is not the most instantly stunning, that might be because he takes the time to deliver worlds within worlds, layers under layers, to create an overwhelming experience by the end.

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The film starts with the sound of a siren and an explosive scene. During World War Two, the hospital where Mahito's mother works catches fire, red-orange flames filling the night sky. Mahito races through the street toward her, embers flying around him, but the hospital collapses and she dies. A year later he and his father move to the country, where his father continues working for a company that makes wartime planes for Japan, just like the hero of Miyazaki's last film, The Wind Rises, (2013) and the director's own father. And his father has married Natsuko, the younger sister of Mahito's mother. The loneliness we see on the boy's face there is unmistakable, another sign of how brilliantly Miyazaki brings to life characters who visually exist in bold outlines. You cannot dismiss them as cartoons.

As in The Wind Rises, this World War Two-era film often has a slightly subdued palette, in shades of grey, but those colours are still extraordinary. A heron seems to be fascinated by Mahito; the heron's wings are bordered by a distinctive blue-grey that definitely belongs to Miyazaki. As in all his films, each architectural detail, each plate on a shelf, has its own finely-drawn and coloured design. As Mahito's story heads toward the supernatural, the film displays a more extravagant sense of colour and imagination.

In the way of fairy tales, Miyazaki asserts an emotional pull through fantastical events

Mahito dreams of his mother, her face behind a glowing flame, calling out to him, "Mahito, save me." Everything in the film flows from that grief, but in the way of fairy tales, Miyazaki asserts an emotional pull through fantastical events. Viewers can parse the film's many meanings later. There is Mahito's heart-wrenching wish to be reunited with his dead mother, and beyond that even more existential questions. He finds a book his mother inscribed and left for him, a real-life 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino called How Do You Live? That book loosely inspired the film, which was released under that title in Japan, and the question it raises is one Mahito faces at the end. But all of those themes come wrapped in an increasingly surreal and absorbing story.

The heron, who suddenly seems more like a vulture, speaks in a croaking man's voice and leads Mahito to a stone tower built by his eccentric great-great-uncle, who disappeared soon after. The heron claims that Mahito's mother is alive in the tower. Soon Natsuko disappears too, perhaps into the tower. When Mahito enters to save them he enters a world as beautiful as any Miyazaki has made, a grand chamber with brightly coloured mosaic floors and chandeliers. There, Natsuko lies on a chaise, but when Mahito touches her shoulder to wake her she melts into a black puddle that flows onto the floor. The dazzling, logic-defying images that Miyazaki is known for never stop coming after that, as the story moves from one realm to another. A gnome-like old man lives inside the heron, and together he and Mahito sink through the floor into another layer of the mysterious world. Mahito crashes through golden gates, chased by giant pelicans that want to eat him. And he is ferried across a river to a land where the line between life and death is unclear, as it so often is in Miyazaki's films.

The Boy and the Heron

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda

Run time: 2hr 4mins

Identities are permeable there, as in dreams. The young woman who rows him to the other world is a version of one of the kindly old housekeepers, mostly grey-haired and toothless, who cared for him in Natsuko's house. In this other world he is guarded by small dolls in the exact likeness of those grannies. Happy, white ghost-like creatures called "warawaras" – imagine Casper the Ghost with cat's ears – float through the air like bubbles, souls waiting to be born. Miyazaki’s visual and narrative imagination is limitless, and carries us with him until Mahito finds his great-great-uncle, and suddenly we are in an ominous, spare architectural space that evokes a De Chirico painting.

The pace of all this never slows, and there is too much coming at Mahito for anyone to absorb in a single viewing. It might seem that Miyazaki is putting in everything he can while he can. After all, 10 years ago he declared The Wind Rises to be his final film. Now it has become commonplace to call The Boy and the Heron his final film. I don't know about that. He is such a magician, he might just go on and on.

★★★★★

The Boy and the Heron is out in Japan. It is released in the UK and US on 8 December.

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The Boy and the Heron review: Miyazaki's 'last' film is a masterpiece (2024)

FAQs

Why is The Boy and the Heron a masterpiece? ›

This movie is hauntingly beautiful, both in the telling of the story and the animation of it. As in most Studio Ghibli films, the animation style of “The Boy and the Heron” is a delight to view, making it almost impossible to look away from each intense scene.

What is the meaning behind The Boy and the Heron movie? ›

The Boy and the Heron anime explores the themes of grief, family, and responsibilities through a boy's fantastic journey into a parallel world. Miyazaki's metafictional approach to world-building is reflected in the film's dense cosmology.

What is the meaning behind the boy and the blue heron? ›

Miyazaki's films tend to be imbued with a deep, aching sense of nostalgia, but his protagonists are often forced to accept loss. Change is depicted as an unstoppable force; only fools try to resist the passing of time. The Boy and the Heron is about saying goodbye and moving into the future, scars and all.

What is the meaning of the bird and the heron? ›

The heron (as is his scar) is the embodiment of Mahito's trauma from the bombing of a plane causing the death of his mother. Initially, the grief of that trauma makes him want to lose himself, but eventually it becomes a driving force that serves him well once his discovers the person within the bird.

What is the moral of The Boy and the Heron? ›

At the end of the movie, the heron even said to Mahito, "Goodbye, friend." Thus, if we have a negative relationship with someone, it doesn't have to stay that way. We can change the relationship through sincere kindness.

Why are Boy and the heron good? ›

Soulfully exploring thought-provoking themes through a beautifully animated lens, The Boy and the Heron is another Miyazaki masterpiece. Boasting incredible animation and a satisfying story, The Boy and the Heron delivers more of the excellence that Hayao Miyazaki has trained audiences to expect.

What happens at the end of The Boy and the Heron? ›

As such, the film concludes with Mahito having fully processed his grief and found a way to live – rejecting Granduncle's offer of a higher realm to embrace those he loves in his own world. In some manner or another, almost every Miyazaki protagonist has experienced a level of grief throughout their arc.

What is the theme of this story the heron? ›

“A White Heron” serves as an allegory for what humans allow to be done to the environment in the name of progress and how more people need to become protectors rather than pillagers of the natural world.

Why did Mahito hurt himself, The Boy and the Heron? ›

At this point, we the audience know that Mahito has self-harmed. Onscreen, he caused himself to bleed profusely after being bullied, and then denied his father taking action against those perceived to be responsible.

What is the moral of the heron and the fish? ›

The Heron and the Fish is a situational fable constructed to illustrate the moral that one should not be over-fastidious in making choices since, as the ancient proverb proposes, 'He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay'.

What is the lesson of the heron? ›

It's fine to be exactly where you are. Herons stand so still, they often appear to be frozen in place, when really, they're simply waiting for the opportune moment to catch their next meal. They don't chase what they need… they wait for it to come to them.

What does the heron symbolize? ›

Several Native American Tribes look at the heron as a symbol of patience and good luck. On the Northwest coast, people believe that if Native American fishermen spot a heron, it means good luck is with them, and they will have a successful fishing trip.

What is the story behind the boy and the heron? ›

Described as a "big, fantastical film", it follows a boy named Mahito Maki who moves to the countryside after his mother's death, discovers an abandoned tower near his new home, and enters a fantastical world with a talking grey heron.

What are the white things in the boy and the heron? ›

The Warawara are small, white, blob-like spirit creatures that show up in one of the magical in-between worlds in The Boy and The Heron. They live on a small island in the middle of the sea, resting in the trees there.

What birds are in the boy and the heron? ›

There are the pelicans who gobble up Warawara, the adorable little spirits inside the magical world the heron takes Mahito to. And there is an army of human-like, colorful parakeets who have taken to the taste of human flesh and developed a militaristic society.

Why did the boy in The Boy and the Heron hit his head? ›

Mahito smashing the rock against his head was an act against himself. He blamed himself for being in his current situation of grief and suffering alone. In the magical world, too, a character known as the Parakeet King is a stand-in for Mahito's father.

What is the lesson of Joy and Heron? ›

Students learn to show respect for and understand others' perspectives, emotional states and needs.

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