The Boy and the Heron review – poet­ry, phi­los­o­phy, pure emotion

The Boy and the Heron may or may not be Hayao Miyazaki’s last film. The 82-year-old Stu­dio Ghi­b­li head pre­vi­ous­ly announced his retire­ment after com­plet­ing Princess Mononoke in 1997, Spir­it­ed Away in 2001, and The Wind Ris­es in 2013. But at the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, a col­league of the great man announced that he is at work on new projects. Yet it sure feels like the end of some­thing. The Boy and the Heron is rich­ly self-syn­the­sis­ing and aching­ly sen­ti­men­tal, col­lat­ing artis­tic motifs from across the Miyaza­ki fil­mog­ra­phy and naked­ly artic­u­lat­ing the hopes it places in the next generation.

The sto­ry begins with a World War Two bomb­ing raid over Tokyo, in which young Mahi­to wit­ness­es the death of his moth­er in an unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly stylised sequence mak­ing unprece­dent­ed-for-Miyaza­ki use of slow motion and point-of-view shots – excit­ing new tech­niques in a film whose look then becomes notably retro. Mahi­to and his father, like the par­ent and chil­dren in My Neigh­bor Totoro, are a frac­tured fam­i­ly who move to the coun­try to be made whole again; in this case, father Soichi will wed his late wife’s younger sis­ter, and move into her family’s estate, staffed by a pha­lanx of bent-backed benev­o­lent crones. But on the grounds of the estate is a mys­te­ri­ous stone tow­er, tur­ret­ed at the top like a witch’s hat, which is the roost­ing place of a heron who takes a curi­ous inter­est in Mahito.

Beings in Miyaza­ki films are often change­able, drawn with shift­ing out­lines and char­ac­terised with shift­ing moral­i­ties and moti­va­tions. His plot­ting is like­wise flex­i­ble, per­haps nev­er more­so than here – the rules of the film’s world are tough to define, mak­ing it quite hard to com­plete­ly take in on a first pass. But even this flux befits an artist who has so fre­quent­ly focused on sto­ries of ado­les­cence, com­ing-of-age – of becoming.

The hero’s jour­ney, with its obsta­cles and per­ils, its guides and helpers, reads in sum­ma­ry like a com­pendi­um of Miyazaki’s career­long inter­est in West­ern fairy tales, with ele­ments echo­ing Charles Per­rault and the Broth­ers Grimm, as well as Greek mythol­o­gy and CS Lewis. And now the visu­al style teems, as in the sim­i­lar­ly plot­ted Spir­it­ed Away, with super­nat­ur­al crea­tures and waves of beasts stream­ing around Mahi­to like indi­vid­ual droplets of water – a par­tic­u­lar­ly high­light is a men­ac­ing flock of para­keets, with their chests puffed out like a general’s.

The orig­i­nal Japan­ese title of The Boy and the Heron trans­lates as How Do You Live?, after a 1937 nov­el for young adults struc­tured as a back-and-forth between a promis­ing 15-year-old boy and his world­ly uncle. Mahito’s jour­ney to the cen­tre of a crum­bling under­world is, essen­tial­ly, an appren­tice­ship, nev­er more­so than when he arrives at the foot of the age­ing magus who cre­at­ed the world Mahi­to will, per­haps, inherit.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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