The auteur of Anime’s Elan is still immaculate
The auteur of Anime’s Elan is still immaculate. ‘The Boy and the Heron’ is centered around its 12-year-old protagonist, Mahito, whose life is upended by World War II and his mother’s death in the firebombing of Tokyo
Susan Napier in her book Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (Yale University Press, 2018) narrates an incident which attests to Hayao Miyazaki’s ability to draw with exactness and superlative attention to detail from his childhood days—Arata Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki’s elder brother, once saw two teachers pausing in front of little Hayao’s drawings. “That’s just too good,” one of them remarked, implying that his little brother must have had adult help. The Boy and the Heron (2023) is not Miyazaki’s chef d’oeuvre, and most possibly not a coda to an illustrious animation fugue, but it is still too good—with no other implication but the obvious.
The Boy and the Heron is centered around its 12-year-old protagonist, Mahito, whose life is upended by World War II and his mother’s death in the firebombing of Tokyo. The diegesis follows Mahito as he grapples with the grief of his lost mother and struggles to cope with his new life in the countryside. Not everything is the quotidian mundanity in Mahito’s new life and it doesn’t take long for young Mahito to encounter the presence of the fabulous—a palpably evilish anthropomorphic heron appears, it talks and lures Mahito into literal new worlds, it gets transmogrified and leads Mahito into a terra incognita Anime.
After My Neighbour Totoro (1988), and The Wind Rises (2013), The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki’s third film to have a notable autobiographical touch. The war had a massive impact on Miyazaki’s childhood, and to some extent, Miyazaki’s childhood and Mahito’s are alike but the likeness doesn’t go deep. Mahito soon gets pulled into something akin to what Joseph Campbell termed ‘The Hero’s Journey’. Mahito’s otherworldly journey is not exactly a hero’s journey in Campbellian terms but it’s a journey which makes him realize his malice within Anime.
One of Miyazakiworld’s predominant themes is its moral non-dualism, and Miyazaki’s stories almost never confirm their characters’ moral essentialism. The Boy and the Heron also hardly dichotomizes in this respect. There are pelicans who eat the stillborn, anthropomorphic parakeets who try to harm Mahito, and the parakeet king, who against all odds, wants his extant world to remain as it is; but all these characters and their moral narratives do not make it plausible to place them in a binary of good and evil in Anime.
Miyazaki’s magical worlds are sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes frightening, sometimes spooky, sometimes comical, sometimes adventurous, sometimes battlegrounds of ethical conundrums, but they’re never dull and the corollary of this is his every frame demands attention and with a beguiling pull, it spontaneously exacts that attention from the audience like only a few filmmaker’s mise en scène can. The Boy and the Heron is no aberration, its frames veer from tranquil topos to disorienting diegesis and almost none fails to pull the audience in. Here, not only the visual medium, on which Miyazaki is capable of painting his most personal language, is striking but the auditory medium also works brilliantly. Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator, Joe Hisaishi’s excellent score, his poetical symphonic notes bring the full emotions of the film’s protagonist to the fore Anime.
One salient feature of Miyazaki’s late works is his multiperspectivalism, to accommodate distinct worlds in one single form and The Boy and the Heron is an embodiment of that. Here, disparate worlds collude and collide; the dead, the living and the stillborn roam in one.
There’s a scene in My Neighbour Totoro where the two child protagonists Satsuki and Mei wait in a bus stop for their father to return, what then follows is ‘ma’, the space between actions, the stillness for contemplation. Not only his early works, almost all of Miyazaki films feature prominent moments of ‘ma’. Miyazaki himself has demonstrated the concept and significance of it but The Boy and the Heron lacks such prominent moments of stillness. The latter half of the film constantly bombards the audience with veritable apotheosis with no Anime.
The Boy and the Heron’s Japanese title is taken from Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 book ‘How Do You Live?’ and the film was released in Japan with no synopsis, trailer, or marketing, and prior to the release, a single watercolor poster was all the audience had. From the title, everyone presumed that the film would be based on the book and so publishers rushed to bring forth new versions of the Yoshino novel, even Neil Gaiman wrote a forward for a version commemorating the Miyazaki adaptation Anime.
It turned out not to be an adaptation, nothing of that sort, but the question the title of the book poses, has an overarching pervasiveness in the film, and to the question of how do you live, Mahito’s answer lies in his refusal to accept his ancestor’s offer to build a perfect new world, he instead chooses to live in his old world, with his old acquaintances. Mahito’s earthly mother, Himi, knowingly chooses to go back to a world where she’d eventually die in the firebombing of Tokyo Anime. Perhaps to the question of how do you live, the resounding answer The Boy and the Heron gives is “Figure it out yourself.”
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