Review: The Boy and the Heron, by Miyazaki · 4:05am Monday
I don't really want to write this review. I'm a Miyazaki fanboy. I've seen every movie he directed except for his 2 "Conan the Future Boy" movies. Now, lots of people like Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, or Princess Mononoke. Literary types rave about The Wind Rises. But a real Miyazaki fan likes even those movies where Miyazaki as writer just kind of forgets that he's writing a movie, and gets sucked into the everyday lives of characters. Like how Kiki's Delivery Service, allegedly a story about a young witch learning to control her powers, is actually mostly about the minor, non-magical setbacks and successes of the littlest capitalist trying to start a small business to pay her rent. Or how, if someone asks you what the plot of Ponyo or My Neighbor Totoro is, you can only laugh. Lots of Studio Ghibli movies have this slow, meandering non-plot, more like a tour of a foreign land than a movie. It's an acquired taste.
This is because Miyazaki is the ultimate pantser. He writes one word at a time, with no idea what's two words ahead. Plotters plan and plot; pantsers trade integrity and clarity of plot and theme away for more vivid characters, more realism, and more spontaneity.
So when I heard that this movie was really weird, I was prepared for the usual slow Miyazaki meandering. But that is not what I got. The movie is
an abortion, the dead fetus of a great movie entombed in a boulder of bubble-gum. And it's terribly, terribly sad, if it's about what I think it's about.
The animation is of course beautiful. I was especially struck by a scene of a small sailboat coming about, because I've done that thousands of times myself, and the animation made me feel like I was there. Every motion of the skipper, the waves, the boat, and the sail was perfect. Nobody has ever animated a sailboat turning into the wind so well.
The real shocker about this movie, as a Miyazaki movie, is that it has no characters. That's as shocking as it would have been for a Miyazaki movie to have poor animation. We don't get to know any of them. A few, like the heron, at least aspire to being flat characters like you'll find in Dickens. But the major characters have no character and no clear motives. About a quarter of the way into the movie, the main character, Mahito, bashes himself in the head with a very big rock, hard enough that blood pours from the gash, soaking his school, um, non-uniform uniform. This is the only distinctive thing about this character: he nearly killed himself for no obvious reason. I kept waiting to find out why he did it, and... we never find out for sure. It might be because he doesn't want to go to school; but why doesn't he want to go to school? I have a theory, but that motive doesn't connect with anything else in the film--there is no character arc--so even if I'm right, it's uninteresting. There's a dramatic scene at the end where a woman whom I think is Mahito's foster-mother but seems to symbolize his birth-mother screams at him that she hates him, and... we never find out why.
Character and motive don't matter in this movie. The non-characters are paper dolls blown about in the wind of Miyazaki's fevered imagination. I suspect the missing motives were left on the cutting-room floor. There's even ambiguity over who Mahito's mother is. Not as in "there are two women in the movie who might be his mother," but as in "there are two figures in the movie whom he calls "mother", and who look identical, yet are definitely different people, but at times blur together in Mahito's mind."
Instead of characters, arcs, and themes, the movie is mostly Miyazaki pulling one "magical", "wondrous" thing out of his ass after another. A mysterious castle in the forest! A heron that talks! A ghost ship so big it became an island! Carnivorous parakeets! A hallway of infinite doors leading to infinite universes that are never explained or integrated into the story! A meteor that floats in air!
There are things that fit together. For instance, Mahito's birth mother died in a fire, and whenever we later see fire magic, that foreshadows or symbolizes a connection with Mahito's birth mother. (I think.) There might be a lot more things that fit together that I didn't notice. But still, this is an entirely different level of "one damn thing after another" than Alice in Wonderland or Everything Everywhere All at Once, both stories which try to overwhelm the reader with one damn random thing after another, and yet created more self-consistent and logical worlds.
SPOILERS AHEAD! But also, the thing the movie is about. If you're going to watch the movie anyway, maybe you shouldn't read this. It will hit you harder if you figure it out for yourself. But most people, at least judging from the reviews on IMDB, never figure it out. And one person who figured it out, wrote that the rest of it makes more sense on a second viewing after you figure it out. So maybe you should read this before watching it.
I've heard that the old man, Mahito's grand-uncle, was originally the movie's main character. That makes sense, because he's the only character with any hint of theme, purpose, or continuity. He built a pocket universe inside a tower that he built around a meteor. Then he spent the next 100 years managing his own fantastic universe, which has gotten more and more chaotic and unpleasant. (E.g., carnivorous parakeets.) My guess is that the 15 minutes near the very end with him trying to convince Mahito to take over managing this fantasy universe for him are what the movie was originally about, and that this subject was so painful to Miyazaki that he couldn't be happy with it no matter what he did with it that he stuffed it into one corner of the movie and filled the rest of it with random, disconnected fantasies.
The movie's Japanese title, remember, is How do you live? There are at least two good ways to read the great-uncle. The one I thought of is that he's Hayao Miyazaki, and Mahito is Hayao's son Goro. The other, attested to by Toshio Suzuki, is that the great-uncle is Isao Takahata, and Mahito is Hayao Miyazaki. In either case, the fantasy world, within which reside unnumbered other fantasy worlds, is all the fantasy worlds the great-uncle created.
Originally the great-uncle taught Mahito something important, presumably something about how to live. Then Isao Takahata died, and Miyazaki lost his nerve, and tore that positive view of the great-uncle out of the movie and inverted it, making the movie a rejection of every fantasy the great-uncle had created, portraying him as a madman wearing himself out by propping up ridiculous, unrealistic, unstable fantasies which were in fact all poisoned by his own personal malice.
Miyazaki's swan song is a cry of despair, the kind that only superstars can make. An ordinary man, reaching the end of his life, may be plagued by the question of whether anything he did really mattered. But this is a shallow despair compared to that of a superstar, because the ordinary man can rarely get past the stage of thinking that "really mattering" would manifest as great "success" recognized by the world. His regrets focus on his personal failures. But when the superstar reaches the end of life, he or she has had that great success, but still suspects that it might not have mattered. Alexander the Great seems to have come to this end. That's a dark, nihilistic despair, not about personal failures, but about the nature of reality.
So on a meta-level, this is a great movie, if we see it not as a movie about the events in the movie, but as a movie about its own making. The disjointed narrative and fractured characters are the results of Miyazaki's own loss of conviction and purpose, which are communicated in the last 25 minutes of the film. You have to read it backwards, seeing the first hour and a half as the wreckage left by the self-implosion of the last half hour. IMHO.
Ohh, I know this kind of despair, I like to ponder this kind of nihilism sometimes. Hell, that's what I am writing about. Reality is a terrifyingly wonderful thing that grinds alike both great minds and comparably talentless hacks like myself, so if you let go of ego then it's not that weird stance to consider, in my opinion
Great stuff, great review, great despair. Gotta watch the movie, thanks for leaving your thoughts on it, much appreciated
It's a gorgeous movie, but an incoherent one. I'm not sorry that I watched it, but I do wish Miyazaki's final film would have been something better.
I remember coming out of The Boy And The Heron confused and conflicted. The visuals were amazing, of course, and it showed moments of the touching insight we see in other Miyazaki movies, but it's completely unclear what the story is about. This is evident if you try to summarise the plot of the movie: a boy moves to his family home in the country during the war, encounters an unnerving bird, finds his way to a tower, goes through to another world and... what? What even happens? What does he do there? What does he learn? What changes as a result? I can't even tell you what the story was trying to do.
This is in contrast to films like Princess Mononoke that, despite being complex and hard to boil down to a simple moral (in fact, it stands against simple good-vs-bad narratives, embracing the multi-sided complexity of the conflict), are wonderfully crafted. Every line, scene and frame serves the vision of the movie, even the moments that seem like they're harmless or just background detail.
Stories like Alice in Wonderland are happy to just be meandering nonsense. But The Boy And The Heron desperately wants to say something serious, but doesn't.
Dude, are you sure you didn't bash your head before entering the movie theatre? Or just came with a weak bladder and kept going to the bathroom? The movie is about a time-displaced reality held together by a multitude of generations of the same family, who use the mansion as a time portal to be able to coexist despite them having two or three centuries between them. He meets his mother when she was a young. And it turns out that his mother and he are being displaced because the ancestor who holds everything together is slowly losing his ability to keep the local reality from collapsing. The thing near the middle of the movie about the spirits was him doing a side-quest, showing the purpose of the reality he was in before he fully went in. And in the end the reality collapses, and his mother and him have to evacuate back to their timelines. In the end, this movie also mimics "Spirited Away" in that it starts with a bored kid having their life upended by adults making them move cities, then ends with a suddenly much more mature kid earnestly walking back to their boring life.
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Yes, I followed all that. But the heroine of Spirited Away faces and overcomes challenges thru her character. Mahito acts stupidly and rashly most of the time, and is usually saved by luck or by someone else from the consequences. The only thing he does with purpose is try to bring back Natsuko, and he keeps trying even when she makes it clear she doesn't want to go back. If he's more mature at the end, it isn't obvious why.
There is just so much more "WTF?" in this movie. Everything in Spirited Away makes sense, fits with the world, and contributes to the story. This movie is just a hot mess of random stuff thrown together, IMHO.
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In a way it's actually better than Spirited Away, though: Chihiro began acting like a seasoned adult from the moment she got her job at the hotel and spa, while in this one the snotty nosed brat acted like a kid who knows he's far outside him depth. And he's not going to be radically more mature in his real life, but he will stop self sabotaging and accept his new life after the move.
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That's a fair point. Same thing for Kiki in K's Delivery Service.
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In Kiki's they at least try to justify it from the very beginning of the movie: witches like her are supposed to leave home at age 13, fly to a town with no witches and try to make a living through her magical skills. Far too young for our tastes, but completely normal by Victorian canons. Also, She had the advantages that the town knew of the tradition and embraced her, and that her parents had been preparing her. Nonetheless, while I haven't watched it for a while, I don't feel Kiki was acting too mature.