Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre has made a case for resisting the egoistic impulse to arrive at a meaning. The Meaning. In that sense, it resists sloth-like comfort. But, in his latest film, you feel pulled.
In The Boy and the Heron, you have Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki), whose mother succumbs to a hospital fire in Tokyo after it is bombed during the Second World War. A short while later, Mahito’s father is married to his mother’s sister — Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura) — and the three move to the countryside.
In his new abode, Mahito is anguished by the memories of the fire, and is tackling festering grief as his guardians seem to have a sense of forwardness. He keeps his tormented headspace to himself. Unable to find a place where he can legitimise his hurt, he takes a rock and injures his head with it, but when questioned about the wound, he resorts to a lie. A grey heron (Masaki Suda) keeps beckoning him, and is pretending he knows where his mother is. It’s a cruel joke, except, Mahito is roped into it when his stepmother, Natsuko, disappears into the fabled tower the heron had been nudging him towards. Along with Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki), one of the older women in his household, he traverses into the alternate realm to retrieve her. What follows is a fantastical swoop into chewing the implications of creating a safe space — one without malice — amidst the grief and wreckage, or to resist the neatness of this idea.
The conundrum of neatness becomes meta when you obsess over the detailing in the film. The Boy and the Heron is purportedly based on Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live — a work that only accessorises the actual film. But, a befuddling detail in the movie is an illustration of a car travelling from Tokyo to the countryside in the book. This is not what happened in Yoshino’s work. (It did happen to Miyazaki himself — his family fled to the countryside from Tokyo during the Second World War in 1944.)
The heron, though one of the titular characters, flits in and out of the story, almost like a meta-presence rather than a fleshed out, ravaged, and lived-in entity.
Almost every scene in the film contains a homage to Miyazaki’s previous work. The grannies at his house in the countryside are reminiscent of Yubaba in Spirited Away (2001). The ghostly ships in the alternate realm remind you of the imageries from Future Boy Conan (1978). Also, Porco Rosso (1992) and The Wind Rises (2013). There is a starry, galaxy-brained sky where Granduncle conducts a conversation with Mahito, which could easily refer to Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). And many more.
Then there is the old man, called Granduncle (Shohei Hino), who broods, and mulls over 13 blocks. Why 13? They are haphazardly stacked; one inconsiderate move, and an inelegant fall would mean that the universe would literally come apart. Unless, someone like Mahito could take over. (Thirteen, conveniently, is also the number of animated films Miyazaki has made to date.)
How do you not shamelessly read into this and think it represents the present situation of Studio Ghibli? The chatter around Miyazaki’s self-admitted retirement was shushed by him before the release of his latest film, but he is 82 and without an heir to his iconic studio. If the circumstances were to persist, the studio is likely to experience its demise at the same time as the master animator. Is this film a self-examination of his legacy then, as well as a direct attempt to engage the audience in ensuring its continuity?
But there is something to be said about Miyazaki, and his film, where even when he enables such an easy reading of the text, as a whole it still remains vastly generative and bewildering. There is a protest against firm categorisation here when you realise that the grey heron is a supernatural man who is using a bird skin — an unsettling detail that induces horror — especially when he creates a water clone of Mahito’s mother to mock him. The tone, within seconds of this, switches to comedy when the heron is rebuked by the Granduncle for being an incompetent guide to Mahito. The element of fire symbolically and tangibly scars, whether it is in the nightmares that creep up on Mahito, or when you recollect how his mother passed away. This tidy connotation, though, is easily flipped when we meet Himi (Aimyon), who uses the flames to protect Mahito from carnivorous parakeets, and then the Warawara creatures from bloodthirsty pelicans in the fantastical realm.
But these strange introductions to different beings that constitute the realm in The Boy and the Heron can feel jarring, even if you want to indulge them as a Miyazaki idiosyncrasy. You are intrigued by Warawara — the creatures who will be born into the real world, and what their birth signifies. You will also seek out why scores of pelicans grotesquely feast on these Warawara — these harmless beings that look like white fluff balls that espouse the cuteness of the cinders in Spirited Away. What reduced the pelicans to such desperation? The film, like the rest of the auteur’s works, revels in dignifying unknowingness. But, one shouldn’t have to pull out subtext to make sense of a narrative, even if it is supposed to be perplexing.
But the singular moral clarity that informs Mahito’s choices can be assuaging. In a deeply moving scene, when the Granduncle asks Mahito to take over the realm, and construct something beautiful that exists without malice, Mahito points towards the gash on his head. He reasons that his self-harm indicates that he is not without the malice the old man feels repulsed by. Mahito decides to leave the realm, along with Natsuko, his mother, and the grey heron to reckon with the implications of the war outside. (His mother, as it turns out, was in the tower, just like the heron had initially suggested. She had gotten lost there when she was a young girl. But, despite the fact that she is aware that she will die in the hospital fire, she accompanies Mahito into the real world.)
Yoshino’s work, and the film, do not resemble each other when it comes to events. But, just like the book, Miyazaki offers a story, and an answer. A simple one. Perhaps idyllic living is a constant negotiation with the ugliness that continuously manifests, and no illusion can save us from that reckoning. Miyazaki’s protagonists just seem to realise this sooner than most.