Thoughts on The Boy and the Heron

 

    Today I saw Hayao Miyazaki's 2023 anime film The Boy and the Heron, (the original Japanese title translates to How Do You Live, referencing a 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino but not an adaptation) which won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film last week. It centers on a young boy named Mahito, who loses his mother during the Pacific War during World War II in a hospital fire, and two years later, his father marries his late wife's sister (as a tradition of widowers marrying their late wives' sister), and move to her rural estate from Tokyo, near the father's munitions factory. The estate has several elderly maids, who are excited to receive luxuries like chocolate and tobacco because of limited war rations. There. Mahito, struggling with grief and feeling depressed from his life being upended, made to accept his aunt as his new "mother," deliberately hits himself in the end with a rock after being bullied by classmates, as an act of self-harm and showing more of his pain on the outside, as well as a way to keep from going back to school. 

    At the estate, he meets a grey heron, who had led him to a sealed tower that was built by his granduncle, then later, now speaking, with human teeth and revealing another creature within the heron. His stepmother has been spirited away to another dimension, and the heron claims that he can take Mahito to her. Mahito is sure that it is a trap, but continues to follow the heron, with one of the maids, Kiriko, with him. There, they both enter into an underground world that plays with space and time, not just with Mahito and his stepmother and his mother, but with his granduncle, Kiriko, and a fire spirit. The heron, pelicans, spirits yet to be born, and large parakeets also play a big part in the different realms.

    It had been years since I had seen a Miyazaki film, and I'm only casually familiar with his films, having seen Spirited Away, Ponyo, and parts of Princess Mononoke and Kiki's Delivery Service. So I had forgotten how deep his films get into fantasy adventures, and get into layers involving family histories and legacies and confronting the pasts to mature towards the future. The film is based on Miyazaki's childhood, as he lost his mother as a child, his family left the city for the countryside during WWII, and his father worked for a company that was involved in the manufacturing of fighter plane components. So it is more of a coming of age film, focused on the relationship between a boy and his mother, and getting to communicate with her and say goodbye to her years after a sudden loss.

    It's an interesting film that I had to think about more, as well as read other analysis to understand. It's a film about self-acceptance, about accepting love from others and not isolating oneself, dealing with grief and loss, and finding meaning in uncertainty. I really liked the fire animation, which I thought was stunning and a beautiful mix of computer and two-dimensional animation. I liked being taken on the journey, seeing the strange fantasy worlds within worlds that Mahito goes through, and just going with it.