written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki
It feels strange to say this considering my family and I own on DVD nearly every film ever directed by legendary director Hayao Miyazaki, but The Boy and the Heron was the very first Miyazaki movie any of us had ever seen in movie theaters. Better late than never, though. The guy is an anime legend, and I am grateful to have seen at least one of his wonderful films where it was meant to be seen: on the big screen. Coming into this film, I was actually a little worried; Miyazaki's most recent film prior to this, 2013 The Wind Rises, had lost a lot of his charm, but even though The Boy and the Heron isn't quite on the level of Miyazaki's very best, it is at least a very welcome return to form for him.
The story actually starts out on a grim note, with the protagonist, teenage boy Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki) losing his mother to a fire as the Allied Forces bomb Japan in the middle of World War II. Following the chaos, Mahito and his dad Shoichi (Takuya Kimura) move out to the countryside, Mahito meets his father's new wife Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura) who also happens to be his mother's younger sister. As Mahito grapples with his grief and loss out in the countryside, he receives a most unexpected visitor: a talking gray heron (Masaki Suda), who leads Mahito into a magical, mysterious world where he learns a lot of things he didn't know about life and death, including certain truths about his mother.
This film is reportedly rather personal to Miyazaki; he grew up in post-World-War II Japan and like Mahito, he, too, lost his mother, though much later in life, and to disease and not a fire. This tinges the whimsy with a gentle melancholy. As a result, even though Miyazaki's usual commentaries about greed or the military-industrial complex are absent from this film, there's still a weight to it that makes it feel compelling in its own right. By anchoring its narrative on the kind of pain that only the death of a loved one can induce, the film introduces audiences to a Miyazaki protagonist unlike any we've ever seen before. Miyazaki's last protagonist, airplane designer Jiro Hirokoshi, was notably unsympathetic as a character because of how he put his love for aviation over everything, even his own humanity. Fortunately, Miyazaki goes in completely the opposite direction with the youthful Mahito, who bears a very human emotional burden all throughout the story.
I'll admit the film sometimes feels unwieldy because of the wildly different tones it must juggle, but Mahito's heartache lends the story real gravitas, and imbues the striking images with a weight and soul they wouldn't otherwise have. The whimsical world Mahito visits, after all, is the Land of the Dead.
Miyazaki's visual signature permeates the film, which is what makes the fantastical elements pop all the more. It was a striking choice to start the film with the violence of the blaze that killed Mahito's mother, but as the fire recurs throughout the film in flashbacks, it helps lend the film its distinct visual identity, as do Miyazaki's flourishes like a multitude of cute characters, namely the Warawara, who evoke the Soot Sprites from My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Miyazaki's longtime composer Joe Hisaishi contributes a suitably emotional score, if not a particularly striking one.
It really was gratifying to finally see a Miyazaki movie in theaters. Given that the man is 80 years old I don't imagine I'll get to see a whole lot more, which makes this even more of a privilege. Though I may not consider this his best work, if I only ever watched one Miyazaki movie in theaters, I could have done a lot worse than this one.
8.5/10
