Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron is one of those cases where I have to pull out one of my old standby phrases: your mileage may vary. That’s not to say I disliked the film; far from it. I’m just not in the camp that considers it one of Miyazaki’s many masterpieces.
Coming out of a decade-long retirement after finishing his more grounded The Wind Rises in 2013, Miyazaki, along with his crew at Studio Ghibli, has gifted us a film which resides in a different one of his major career quadrants: the weird portion. Its first half moves relatively more slowly than its second, as young Mahito Maki (voice of Soma Santoki in the subtitled version; voice of Luca Padovan in the English dub) moves from Tokyo to live with his new stepmother Natsuko (voice of Yoshino Kimura with subtitles; Gemma Chan in the dub) at her countryside estate during wartime. Mahito’s mother has passed away tragically not long before the move, which makes Mahito a much more interior and conflicted main character than many of Miyazaki’s films tend to feature.
In my view, the slower, more meditative, more Mahito-focused opening third of Heron is absolutely sensational in every single way. Natsuko’s estate feels so lived-in; such care is taken with drawing every little detail of the sprawling yet comfortable house. The landscapes surrounding the house are gorgeous as well, and the film still feels totally assured as a few of its more fantastical characters begin to populate it.
The first of these newcomers is a strange half-heron, half-man creature referred to as The Grey Heron (voice of Masaki Suda with subtitles; Robert Pattinson in the dub). He’s a bit of a trickster, parroting Mahito’s grief back at him before revealing his full form, which looks a little like a man in a college mascot costume. The Grey Heron is our way into what is basically a different dimension inside a mysterious abandoned tower on the property, which Natsuko seems drawn to before going missing completely. Mahito suggests she might have gone inside, and The Grey Heron becomes our semi-comedic guide through this strange, often metaphorical world.
Miyazaki then takes us through several of his favorite visual ideas, but they’re almost always given a fresh spin here because of the autobiographical nature of the piece. The film is very loosely connected to a 1937 novel by Genzaburō Yoshino entitled How Do You Live? (which is the original Japanese title of the film), but it mostly consists of ideas surrounding Miyazaki’s thoughts on life, death, and the promise of younger generations.
None of the visuals of the second half or the themes they represent are ever boring, but none of them sync up with each other in any kind of pattern of narrative logic. No one could ever accuse Miyazaki of being cynical or pretentious, but in this case and a few others throughout his illustrious career, he certainly eschews connective tissue for a more personal artistic statement. This leaves us as an audience free to let the film’s visuals and ideas wash over us, which can be very enjoyable, but we’re not necessarily taken along for the entire ride. Heron’s fantastical side basically plays out in lovely, diverting chunks rather than developing into a fully coherent narrative. Again, what’s lovely about each section is truly transcendent. It’s just that your mileage may vary on what kind of overall impact these loose ideas will have by the time the credits roll.
If you’re a die-hard fan of Miyazaki’s work, you will absolutely get your money’s worth out of The Boy and the Heron. Many of its visuals and concepts left my jaw agape. I just wish I felt that way all the way through rather than in fits and starts, because this master of animation has proved several times over how sensationally smooth and cohesive he can make his wildest ideas feel at his very best. | George Napper
The Boy and the Heron is now playing in theaters in Japanese with English subtitles or in an English-dubbed version
