For what is reported to be his last foray into film (and is his first such effort in a decade), the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has chosen grand abstraction. The Boy and the Heron, which made its international premiere here at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday, concerns itself with themes of time and fate while diving into other worlds—the multidimensional variety and, maybe, the humble old human afterlife.
The Boy and the Heron begins straightforwardly, in a mortal realm we recognize: a tweenage boy, Mahito (Soma Santoki), loses his mother three years into WW II, her hospital firebombed by the Allies. This terrible calamity, witnessed up close, sends Mahito into the laconic stupor of grief—commingling, perhaps, with the more generic laconic stupor of dawning adolescence. Some time after that tragedy, Mahito’s father, a war profiteering industrialist, Shoichi (Takuya Kimura), moves the family from Tokyo to a rural estate near his factory, and home to Mahito’s maternal aunt, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), who is to marry Shoichi and is pregnant with Mahito’s soon-to-be step-sibling.
This is a familiar setup for a coming of age story, a young person managing an unthinkable loss as they struggle to adapt to new realities. But Miyazaki does not traffic in the familiar. He’s a fantasist, possessed of an odd and idiosyncratic imagination, his creations at once whimsical and frightening. The Boy and the Heron, called How Do You Want to Live? in Japan, expands and expands as it goes, forsaking the grounded drama of its first act for a wild trip through the many doors of infinite-timeline possibility.
It’s all building to a specific emotional payoff, but Miyazaki takes his merry, discursive time in getting there. He’s a filmmaker obsessed (mostly a credit, but occasionally a fault) with the endless detail of his designs. The Boy and the Heron revels in its beauty—its windswept islands; its loving depictions of rural Japan and its wizened old ladies, whose domestic nattering belies a trove of secrets—while also provoking audiences with its ugliness.
We’re shown rushes of blood and the balloon gush of fish guts slopping out of a slit-open belly. Murderous, fascistic parakeets attempt to devour several people. The heron of the title is a grotesque trickster demon, a humanoid head peeking out of a bird’s open beak and speaking harshly, with a bitter comic edge, in Masaki Suda’s effectively coarse, creepy voice performance.
But so much of that unpleasant stuff is, gradually, embraced by Miyazaki’s humanist (and avianist) view of things. Capturing the strangeness of existence—its nasty squish and its overwhelming loveliness, nestled right alongside one another—is how Miyazaki tethers his flights of fancy to something like relatable experience. Who hasn’t at some point in their lives been confronted, just as Mahito is, with the profane and the sublime all at once, with or without the menacing pelicans?
That relatability is only sussed out in a closer post-viewing read of The Boy and the Heron—and of many other Miyazaki films. His work can be alienating, his cinematic grammar choppy and free-wheeling. The Boy and the Heron jumps erratically from one moment to another; new rules are dismissed as quickly as they are introduced. It’s a lot to process, to hold together as one cohesive narrative adventure.
In The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki continues to heap on ever more concepts right up to the very end. One probably shouldn’t be too fussed about that; Miyazaki has earned the right to sudden, confusing invention, to indulgent tangent. Still, my limited, Western brain craves steadier shape when watching his films, wishes in vain for the completed metaphors and satisfying callbacks of a story perhaps more straightforwardly told. The emotional punch of The Boy and the Heron is a heart-swelling assertion of cosmic purpose, even amidst sadness and ruin. But it’s delivered after a lot of digression, which can make this swan-song film seem like more a collection of Miyazaki’s disparate, previously unused ideas than a discrete film with a focused mission.
Even so, there is much to savor in The Boy and the Heron, its visual splendor and its winsome insistence on life’s indelible meaning, stitched and seamed by daily choice and boggling chance—a benevolent philosophy imparted by someone born under history’s most annihilating war and now reaching the end of his glorious arc across the sky at a time when history is threatening repetition. May we all someday share Miyazaki’s lingering affection for the grain of the world as it’s revealed to us, both nightmare and wondrous dream.
Richard Lawson
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