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MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

In 2013 legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki released the film The Wind Rises and announced that he was retiring from filmmaking. His company Studio Ghibli would continue creating movies with animators who learned their craft under Miyazaki’s mentorship. The world was therefore delighted a decade later when it was announced that Miyazaki – at the age of 82 – had been working on a new picture. After its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this past September, The Boy and the Heron received universal praise from early audiences who were delighted to see yet another incredible film from the creator of Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke.

Rather than share in their unbridled delight, my initial response to The Boy and the Heron was a combination of appreciation and befuddlement. This movie seemed to be a mashup of most of the themes of Miyazaki’s sixty-year career squeezed into two hours of screen time.

There’s nothing essentially wrong about a director revisiting familiar tropes. but in this case things get disturbing fairly early in the process.

The film begins a few years after the start of World War II. Twelve-year-old Mahito Maki (voice by Luca Padovan) suffers the death of his hospitalized mother during a bombing raid of Tokyo. He later moves into a country estate with his father (Christian Bale) and his pregnant stepmother (Gemma Chan) who happens to be his mom’s younger sister – his aunt! While dad is at work at a wartime aviation factory, Mahito encounters a talking gray heron (Robert Pattinson) who leads him to a mysterious tower. The boy is bullied at school and filled with enough self-loathing to bash the side of his head with a rock. The movie then moves into complicated realms of fantasy. I was never quite sure what was going on during the second hour of the film right up to its abrupt ending.

Defenders of this movie insist that repeat viewings are required to unpack the many levels of meaning – including its citing of a 1937 novel How Do You Live? (which is the Japanese title for this film). There are too many movies right now that demand this discipline, including most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars and Spiderverse. What ever happened to simple storytelling?

I will continue to champion the films of Studio Ghibli (and encourage you to enjoy its many movies available to stream on Max in both Japanese and dubbed versions). Hayao Miyazaki is a genius and worthy of his stature in animation history. However, the best place to begin your appreciation of his films is with the wonderful children’s film My Neighbor Totoro, the environmental fable Princess Mononoke or the spiritual fantasy Spirited Away.

The Boy and the Heron should be reserved for a future term paper in Film Studies. After you figure it out to your professor’s satisfaction, I would appreciate receiving a copy!

Halo and Pitchfork Rating:

Three halos: A visually stunning – but also confounding – film about memory, grief, loss, and coming of age.
Three pitchforks: Scary and sometimes crude images; a tragic death; violent self-harm; tobacco use.

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