🖍️ Animation 🇯🇵 Japan 🎬 Hayao Miyazaki (2023) 🌟 AA 🌞GG

”Daddy is going to make sure you get vengeance. But first, you have to tell me who did this.”“Awk awk awk! Your presence is requested!”

A very interesting film visually. Like most of Miyazaki’s work, The Boy and the Heron takes a young person and transports them into a magical journey of some sort, from which they eventually return but meaningfully changed. I dislike writers relying on Joseph Campbell, but these are unmistakably the story structure he describes, which is also very similar to Vladimir Propp’s folktale cycle.

With Miyazaki, time after time, this provides a rewarding result. I doubt he is doing this intentionally; I think this is his intuition of how to structure a tale, it’s a natural human intuition, and he does a great job with it. It’s in the visual details, the animation style, and the unique worlds he creates that these become more than cliches or a monomyth, and in both detail and universality they tap into something emotional and profound in their audiences. I have seen most of Miyazaki’s work, and it’s very rare he has a film that fails to touch people, even the silliest ones.

This is interesting to me because, in the case of The Boy and the Heron (original and more telling title, “How do You Live”), most reviewers seem to find this moving and to be saying something powerful. But this was not an immediately intuitive and coherent narrative for the viewers I watched it with. Most were left baffled about the specifics of what happened in the end and why it worked, even though all basically enjoyed the experience. The sense that it said something was strong, and it caused emotions, but there was not universal agreement about what it said and why. Only one viewer found this distracting; most of us enjoyed the film.

I don’t ever read reviews before watching, but I checked some analysis after. Most people are able to take all of the possible things this story could mean and hammer a clear message out of it, but that’s also doing violence to what makes the story work: that it allows the audience to make meaning through it and creates a space for the viewer to do their own emotional work. Or, if they would rather, they can just watch a prettily illustrated and entertaining story.

For my own reaction, there was a lot that at first glance did not necessarily hold up when thought about. It reminds me of the line in Tenet telling the protagonist to stop thinking and just feel what inverting entropy means. The mechanism of fantasy here is identical. As with Tenet, there are logical answers about what happened and what it means, and possibly a single factual explanation, but here especially where intellectual cleverness and fussy timelines isn’t the point, it may not be all that important.

Without the context of Japan during wartime and this being possibly the last work of a great filmmaker, does The Boy and the Heron still present something transformative? Well, yes, obviously it does, because people feel it does, and I’m not about to quibble their experiences away. It did not, for me. It may or may not for you. In fact, it’s almost certainly the underdetermined nature of the plot and the messaging that allows people to project into it what is meaningful for them, and that’s frequently the best writing approach. We are all meant to experience art differently; that’s normal.

What worked for me, unlike the totality of the plot, was every specific detail Miyazaki created. The moment the magical voyage bit started, I enjoyed the whole thing. With Nausicaa, Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Totoro—all of the classics—he shows such a robust imagination, and here, once the heron encounter starts and things begin to become fantastical and dreamlike, Miyazaki crafts location after location and image after image that are unforgettable. So, while the overall mother sister child narrative and the bizarre temporality choices felt confused to me, and the whole ‘pocket’ thesis wasn’t immediately how I read the story, it almost didn’t matter, because that’s not why I was watching.

This line of thinking really doesn’t have to matter: Miyazaki always manages to make people feel. And that is the power of his visual style, and his deft hand at throwing characters into situations that feel life changing and profound, and his ability to create characters that people can read themselves and their lives into and project the structure of what matters to them into the tale so that it can perform the work of magic and fantasy inside them. All of this feels alive and real and beautiful in his work.

This is a very good film. To me, it is not near his best. But it’s very enjoyable. If you are into Miyazaki’s work, you probably don’t need me to recommend it to you, but yeah, it’s worth seeing.

Recommended.

Some Lists:

🖍️ Animation
🇯🇵 Japan
🏆 2023 Ranked
🎬 Hayao Miyazaki
🌟 96th Academy Awards Shortlisted Films Ranked
🌞 2024 Golden Globes Nominees
💎 Slightly Hidden Horror Gems and 🌱 Candidates
📽️ Viewing Next 🗂️ Index of Lists

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