Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, released in Japan July 14, described as astounding in visual beauty and complex in philosophical messages.
Anticipated by millions, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in a decade, The Boy and the Heron, finally met public in Japan Friday.
Information about the movie prior to release was scant. The film was loosely inspired by Japanese author Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 philosophical children’s book, How Do You Live?, one of Miyazaki’s personal favorites.
Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki, considered Miyazaki’s righthand, said that the great animator was making the movie for his grandson.
The studio’s decision to do no promotion–releasing no plot summary, voice cast, trailers, art— kept fans in state of curiosity and mystery.
Early reviews emerge from Japan, in both English and Japanese, suggest a movie that’s visually stunning but darker and more enigmatic than other Ghibli features.
“It’s a film you could watch a hundred times and still discover new things in the background of any given scene. It cannot be understated how the little visual details take the film from real to surreal — like a heron flashing a toothy grin or wooden dolls vibrating as if in sympathetic laughter. It’s an animation tour de force unlike anything seen in the past decade.”
“This film is among the best of Ghibli’s works in visuals and story,” Japanese film site Eiga Channel wrote. “But those not Ghibli fans may be confused by dizzying pace of scene development.”
“Ghibli, which has produced fantasy works easily understandable by children, has released a work that requires time and consideration to understand.”
“To understand the setting and story deeply, you need to commit to watching it repeatedly while analyzing Hayao Miyazaki as a person,” the outlet said while noting similarities between The Boy and the Heron‘s story and Miyazaki’s own biography.
The film begins with depiction of firebombing Tokyo during World War II. The story’s protagonist, a boy named Mahito, is fleeing his home. His mother is lost and his father, who works in factory producing warplanes, marries his late wife’s younger sister and moves the family to grand home in the countryside.
Personal Film
Mahito, wracked by grief and filled with angst over new circumstances, begins exploring his surroundings. He meets mischievous blue heron that taunts him — and stumbles upon a mysterious abandoned tower in the forests. When his new mother goes missing, Mahito follows the heron into the tower in pursuit of her — crossing over into parallel world of dizzying fantasy and philosophical import.
Miyazaki’s own family escaped the bombing of Tokyo for the countryside and his father worked during the war as an engineer in a fighter plane factory, just like Mahiko’s.
Miyazaki also has spoken over the years about how an especially close relationship with his mother shaped him as a person and helped inspire the strong female protagonists that recur across his filmography.
Taichiro Yoshino, grandson of Genzaburo Yoshino, author of How Do You Live in 1937, published article in Japanese Friday describing preview screening of the film, where Miyazaki shared brief words about his final feature.
The director’s statement was simply: “Perhaps you didn’t understand it. I myself don’t understand it.”
In 2017, Miyazaki explained his plan to make a film loosely inspired by Yoshino’s grandfather’s book. Miyazaki said he was coming back from retirement to approach film from new perspective.
“I’ve been avoiding it for a long time, but I have to make a film that’s more like me,” Miyazaki told him.
“I made several works about boys who were cheerful, bright, and positive, but that’s not the way many boys really are. I myself was a person who was really hesitant, so I always thought that boys are actually less pure and swirling with all kinds of things.”
Yoshino’s article goes on to become a moving meditation on the legacy of his grandfather’s book, and he describes how the themes in Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron inspired him to ask himself, “If I could have a direct conversation with my grandfather right now, what would I say to him?”
Near the end of the piece, he notes that The Boy and the Heron is “a separate work” from his grandfather’s How Do You Live, but that they perhaps share the same central theme — how to live with oneself and accept a world characterized by conflict and loss.
He concludes with a call to action: “For the time being, let’s go to the theater again in search of hints that I couldn’t collect by watching it just once. You may find a clue for a new ‘dialogue’ with your grandfather too.”
The Boy and the Heron will be released in US by the indie GKIDS later this year.
