"The Boy and His Heron" Offers a New Movie Wonderland of Imagination
Hayao Miyazaki makes another classic work of cinematic art
He had me at a heron.
They are magnificent birds, always arresting to witness them in flight, yet if you get close enough, they do look a bit prehistoric and alien.
The heron of the title, in Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” takes that classic role of a pet-sidekick in a boy’s or girl’s adventure. But as the heron tells the main character, he’s not a friend. He’s a guide, and that might mean a mischievous one.
Yes, he certainly is mischievous. For the young Japanese lad Mahito, wandering around his father’s country estate after the family evacuates the city during World War 2, the heron is in fact a menace at first. Somehow, the heron talks to him about his mother. His dead mother.
She dies, we see in the opening scene, in a tragic fire at a hospital. Mahito awakens to that terrible news, just as we begin the movie, awakening to who he is and this new fact in his life. It will haunt him and us throughout.
How does a boy deal with a mother who died tragically? Miyazaki perpetually plays with the more general version of this theme: children whose parents are sick, absent, or dead, something he must’ve seen personally as a result of World War 2. For Mahito, he distrusts this heron who speaks of his mother. He fashions an arrow out of a knife and the heron’s feathers, and he goes to kill it.
But his new stepmother, his father’s new pregnant wife, goes off missing one day. That leads to a search. Up the way is a mysterious tower on the estate. The heron seems to call him to it. Mahito, cautious and courageous, goes after him.
That begins an adventure that is beyond words, beyond what I can tell you here. If you know Miyazaki, he loves to blend Western and Eastern children’s literature. And so if you are familiar with either, you will see snippets of your favorites. “The Boy and His Heron” goes into an Oz-like Wonderland world, only — I think — it’s an underworld.
Which is amusing to me, because in a class of mine, we just passed through Book 11 of “The Odyssey,” in which Odysseus enters the Greek Underworld and ends up finding his dead mother. It’s a haunting, vague, highly symbolic part of that 2600-year-old epic, slivers of threads of which show up in “The Boy and the Heron.”
The underworld search is Mahito’s. He does think his own mother’s alive, somewhere in or beyond that tower. He passes — I think — into a dreamscape netherworld. The heron takes him down there.
I have given almost nothing away. Now we can speak in judgmental language. This is one of the great works of cinematic imagination I have seen in years. And it spoke to me so much that, at least for me, it’s one of Miyazaki’s best movies.
If you know his work, you know that what I just said means this is one of the great works of art of the last fifty years. Saying that, I really need to be careful because I’ve seen this only once. So consider this a tentative judgment.
Nevertheless, the Wonderland netherworld dreamscape has nothing less than a perfect symbolic logic. A viewer, seeing the boy’s journey, will comprehend it all. And there’s no end to the wonders. At eighty-two years old, Miyazaki lets his imagination run wild. I wish we could all have imaginations like that, and that they would grow as we age, as his seems to have.
You will find symbols everywhere. What do they mean? They just speak mysteriously, like the heron. But the blend of aspects is detectable — a blend of environmental, political, psychological, and spiritual concerns. The boy encounters a flock of pelicans who must eat the pre-born souls of people. Saying that in language, it sounds ridiculous. It somehow makes all the sense in the world in this film.
Late in the movie, Miyazaki hit me hard. I have been teaching a Renaissance art class, and one of Mahito’s big moments takes place in a sparse room with harmonious Corinthian arches, where he has to balance odd shapes so that a fantasy world stays alive. That’s a metaphor for the artist seeking harmony through impossibility. I loved Mahito’s choice — whether he will go for perfect restoration or “live with malice.”
Since Miyazaki is 82, this might be his last movie. He did come out of retirement to make this one, perhaps the best movie an octogenarian has ever made. We can speak of him with the Western greats: Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, Carlo Collodi, Michael Ende. I am sure he fits in with the Eastern greats as well.
See it in the theater. This is one of the year’s best movies.