The Boy and the Heron
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While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother's tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother Natsuko, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the boy's mother. As he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger following the appearance of a persistent gray heron, who perplexes and bedevils Mahito, dubbing him the "long-awaited one."
- Released: 2023-07-14
- Runtime: 124 minutes
- Genre: Adventure, Animation, Fantasy
- Stars: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Ko Shibasaki, Aimyon, Yoshino Kimura, Keiko Takeshita, Jun Fubuki, Sawako Agawa, Shinobu Otake, Karen Takizawa, Jun Kunimura, Kaoru Kobayashi, Shōhei Hino, Takuya Kimura, Robert Pattinson
- Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Comments
- simon-wang - 3 July 2024
This movie has three different meanings
The plot follows a young boy and his new family situation. During his inner struggles, a strangely behaving heron appears and opens a gate into a dream dimension. This dream dimension has its own laws and seems to reflect reality in a way the boy has never thought of.
Firstoff you can watch this film without knowing Miyazaki's work, but you will not be able to comprehend it, in it's entirety.
I have been a huge admirer of his work for many years, and his movies significantly influenced my life. As such I can tell that roughly speaking the film has three different meanings.
1. The relation between imagination/dreams and living:
The film is inspired by Miyazaki's favourite novel 'How do you live?' by Genzaburo Yoshino. Which is also the japanese title of the film. This might seem weird, because the film focuses on a boy's odysee into a fantasy world. What is meant by the title is, how non substantial things such as imaginary worlds and dreams should affect our lives. Miyazaki's answer is: a great deal.
The main character in the book is named Koperu, after Kopernikus, who's world view, that the earth circles around the sun, opposed the view from the rest of the world. And yet he was right.
Just because the world deemed something to be one way, doesn't mean it can't be something completely different.
Like budgies.
2. the relation between imagination/dreams and death:
The scenes with the floating souls, and phantom ships, highly suggest Miyazaki is saying, that our dreams are on a higher plane, then space and time, life and death, they connect people by laws of the heart, rather then the laws of physics. This theory is supported further by the character Himi.
3. Miyazaki's own way of biding farewell, to his work and his legacy:
As others have stated, it is crystal clear, that Miyzaki portraits himself in the tower master and his attempt to create, a better, more respectable world through his movies. But ultimately he has to recognize that his creations are destined to fall apart. However not everything has been in vain. The scenes where the tower collapses, have an uplifting, euphoric undertone, saying that only our dreams make life truely worth living.
This is Miyazaki's final message to us, his audience. The message is hidden in the story, and undertones. Why you might ask? Because if you don't understand the meaning in undertones, you will not understand, when it is spelled out either.
Thank you Miyazaki-san. - JoshuaMercott - 26 June 2024
Another Anime Jewel in Ghibli's Crown
In so many ways, this was a classic Studio Ghibli movie. That's not to say it wasn't original. "The Boy and the Heron" captured a fantastic tale filled with relatable moments, compelling characters, and multiple metaphysical meanings.
Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed what I can only describe as a masterpiece in multi-layered Anime storytelling. More than a few life-lessons were packed into the plot, which by itself was an arresting work of art glazed with subtext and sentiment.
The story revolved around a kid named Mahito Maki (voiced by Soma Santoki). The boy was no stranger to loss, in fact he was a changed soul after his mother passed away in a fire accident.
His father's (Shoichi Maki, voiced by Takuya Kimura) later remarriage (to Natsuko, voiced by Yoshino Kimura) and a consequent shift to the countryside seemed to send Mahito into an emotional spiral of isolation, which was subtly and expertly captured through Ghibli's animation style.
Some of the sequences in the movie evoked Studio Ghibli jewels like "Spirited Away", "Howl's Moving Castle", and "Porco Rosso". Come to think of it, "The Boy and the Heron" contained actual easter-egg references to those and other Ghibli films, including "Puss 'n' Boots", "Castle of Cagliostro", "Princess Mononoke", "Ponyo" and more.
In addition to being a treat for Anime fans, especially Ghibli enthusiasts, "The Boy and the Heron" also contained random empathy. Let's just say, it will be hard for some people not to be whisked away on the movie's whimsical wings of fantasy rooted in reality.
I watched it in the original Japanese (with English subs), which is the only way to see good Anime in my opinion. The dialogues take on a life of their own in their native Japanese.
The entry of the rather capricious Grey Heron (voiced by Masaki Suda) lent this movie a wealth of captivation. The character became even more interesting after it revealed itself to possess a face inside its heron-beak.
The character seemed eldritch, almost like a bird regurgitating its insides; for lack of a better description. Looks aside, the heron soon served as Mahito's reluctant guide and mentor (more like tormentor), making it a pivotal character in the plot.
Other memorable characters like Himi (voiced by Aimyon), The Parakeet King (voiced by Jun Kunimura), Kiriko (voiced by Kô Shibasaki), Great-Uncle (voiced by Shohei Hino), and a troupe of bizarre anthropomorphized creatures enriched this movie to no end.
A missing step-mother, time-travel tropes, evolutionary elements, afterlife sequences, and an enigmatic parallel dimension where both the living and the dead apparently co-existed all added up to a fascinating, informing, and entertaining story that kept me glued to the screen for its entire two-hour runtime.
Despite the visuals being vibrant and emotive, they were also surprisingly haunting. It often felt like I was drifting through a strange dream. This style of filmmaking can bewilder some artists, but in Miyazaki's capable hands "The Boy and the Heron" took on an almost literary structure that conveyed inherently diverse meanings.
The tale also contained plenty of Greek underworld undertones. Lore related to mythic characters embarking on life-changing quests found parallels in the enigmatic deities and personalities in this script.
Additionally, I found mythological side-players like Charon, whom Kiriko (voiced by Kô Shibasaki) reminded me of. And Himi (voiced by Aimyon) who resembled Ariadne and later became quite the red herring.
There were also symbolic transition tropes involving water, gates, stairs, caves, boats, fish, and more. All played out in expert subliminal fashion.
Once the movie concluded, I couldn't help but feel a subtle thought poking at my subconscious telling me that perhaps Mahito had probably committed suicide following the loss of his mother, particularly considering that scene where he was returning home from school after some kids bullied him and he hit the side of his own head with a rock.
Japanese herons, after all, are associated with death, afterlife, and souls. The movie felt like a balanced blend of literal possibilities and metaphorical ones. In this regard, it bloomed into a complex story of a potentially real NDE (near death experience) that, maybe, Miyazaki went through in his younger years.
It also hinted at an alternative take on what he believed may have awaited him in the afterlife if he died or committed suicide back in the day, following heartbreaking situations. On a darker note, "The Boy and the Heron" might be his farewell note (perish the thought) to fans and family.
Back to the boy... Mahito might have alternatively perished in that fire when he'd gone to save his mum. Whatever the kid's intentions, I had a feeling the lad probably died at the time and "The Boy and the Heron" was essentially his transition from life to the afterlife.
In a lot of ways, "The Boy and the Heron" transcended a coming-of-age storyline and blossomed into an introspective journey of self-discovery, emotional closure, and an almost fated discovery of one's destiny on the path taken to avoid it.
