‘The Boy and the Heron’ review: Hayao Miyazaki reckons with legacy

The Boy and the Heron bridges life and death through a timeless tale

A staggering work of expressionism driven by fever dream imagery, at 82 years old, Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki continues to reach new heights. Ten years since his, at the time “last film,” The Wind Rises, he returns with The Boy and the Heron, a beguiling, contemplative, fantastical epic that manages to be his most personal yet. Addressing life’s cyclical necessity for change, the film finds an artist grappling with the finite nature of life through spiritual overtures, crafting a haunting immersion into a dizzying blend of magical realism. Miyazaki reaches into his past to collaborate with his youth to create a story that seeks to question our approach to life and the ever-shifting ways in which we perceive the world. 

With a touch of horror and gothic fantasy, we first meet 12-year-old Mahito following the death of his mother. He and his father move to a new town, his father now engaged to another woman, and rather than find solace in a new home, he haunts its halls. Death follows him even here. The movie quickly establishes its peculiar tone with darker, unsettling elements seeping into the real world as he learns through a talking heron that his mother is still alive. His world expands in layers of heaven and hell once he enters an abandoned tower to look for her. 

A filmmaker who’s always taken pains to capture the details and minutiae of everyday life, here he instills greater texture through the creaking of buses and carts that bend and bow through extra weight. Miyazaki is a master who knows how to embolden the world so that every step, every rivulet of blood, and each scampering footstep possesses a necessary tactility. We feel the world as much as we see and hear it. Light pours into rooms and everything has weight, such as how animation captures Mahito leaning on a door slowly until it falls open. It’s the details of a disheveled bedhead and Mahito’s cowlick from it. 

Even now, Miyazaki develops his skills and grows as a filmmaker. His artistry is limitless, crafting evocative color stories as each frame visualizes different stages of life. From the greens of youth and the deep blues of purgatory, to the golden hues of a library late in the film which signifies some form of “after,” color captures distinctive emotional pulls. Miyazaki reminds us of his titan status as he renders something simplistic as visually monumental.

The striking artistry best displays itself by shooting nature through a horror lens. We see it when Mahito fights against conforming to the unknown: toads that engulf, man-eating parakeets, and herons with human teeth. The real world itself is already otherworldly. Miyazaki addresses this with urgency in the opening moments as Mahito runs towards the burning building where his mother is trapped. In these opening moments, he is already immersed in a world of spirits, surrounded by distorted, shrouded faces, as he runs full throttle into the underworld. In a way, Mahito is chasing death with the demise of his mother, be it running to the fire that inevitably takes her life or his continual race for her in his dreams before they turn into waking nightmares. 

From the fire at the start to the rolling countryside and the dreamlike, purgatory oceans that bear great life while also acting as slaughtering grounds, the film reminds us of nature’s destructive currents. It’s also where Miyazaki and the art direction flourish with some of the filmmaker’s strongest, contrasting colors, his darkest blues canvassing the frames. There’s a severity to some of his structures, harsh blues against warm sunsets rather than cooler, whimsical tones. 

The incomparable composer Joe Hisaishi returns in a score that becomes the backbone of the film, covering all of the emotions that the dialogue sparse story can’t verbalize. Piano-driven, the score is both a mournful ode to a filmmaker’s legacy as well as a wistful coda. Distinctive in its simplicity, Hisaishi captures those thematic undercurrents of heaven and hell, the natural world versus the fantastical, and how, at a certain point, they begin to bleed together. This is perhaps most notable in the number “Ask Me Why,” played three times throughout the film with minor yet integral differences. Hisaishi plays all three himself. This adds to the deeply personal aspect of the film that asks us to spend time in the refuges of memory. 

Written by Miyazaki, the film finds pockets of solace in an otherwise unrelenting pace and a somber starting point. This is, after all, a story about the loss of innocence, led by a boy who has grown up in wartime and the literal, figurative pains of youth and loss. When speaking about sprites that inhabit the world, someone tells him that they “mature then fly.” This line speaks directly to the film’s heart. While the soul and mind of The Boy and the Heron ache with all that could be and all that time can’t overcome, its heart truly believes in our capacity for growth. It’s both a welcome into the world and a eulogy for all that’s come and gone. 

It’s why the original Japanese name for the film, “How Do You Live,” is much more apt as it deals so much with how we contemplate life and our tethers to the past. Create the universe you wish to live in and determine how to greet life without malice. A story about balancing the scales and the give and take that comes from it, The Boy and the Heron, like its young protagonist, can barely contain emotions that seek to spill over. It’s the cinematic equivalent of laughing while crying or weeping from joy. In a way, grief breathes life into the film, from the death of Mahito’s mother to the ruminations on finding a predecessor to help maintain balance.

This is fable-building and myth-making, a story that touches on the virtues of youth while accepting the inescapable fact of growing older as we reflect on our past mistakes and hope to find retribution. Miyazaki offers dual roles in his film. The boy, Mahito, is emotional and sensitive as he experiences life. In turn, the old man stands as a barrier between the ancient world and the new. 

It’s one of the many ways that The Boy and the Heron acts as a rumination on Miyazaki’s past works. Think of this line from Princess Mononoke: 

“You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.” 

A thematic core transgresses throughout his works, and Miyazaki takes an emotional stance here as he writes with greater insight and perhaps greater melancholy. Late in the film, Mahito hears that “forgetting is normal.” We wish it weren’t true, but the grand adventures of our youth are prone to our mind’s waning capacity to bottle and store them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t leave an impression — that they didn’t matter.

There’s such grandiosity to the film yet it refuses classic happy endings and the need to engage in typical structural beats. Everything in this world shifts and moves as if it’s all alive beneath Mahito’s feet, a visual indication of how life is constantly in flux. The Boy and the Heron speaks to a world constantly on the cusp of being devoured by hatred and man-made violence. It offers hope but it’s hard won and is twinged by grief. 

Despite all of this and the, at times, stifling grief that pervasively clings to the bones of the story, The Boy and the Heron offers hope. The line “young souls are precious” sticks out, as the film celebrates youth while delivering a film that is celebratory of all stages, a film that begs questions from the young and seeks answers for past days lived. While it may not be the filmmaker’s best, it’s as otherworldly and deeply impassioned as any film he’s ever made.

Reveling in its ability to showcase a director whose limitations are boundless, The Boy and the Heron exposes the truths of the human condition under the guise of fantasy. It’s why the natural world depicted here is just as mysterious as that of the fantastical one. Miyazaki has always known that the ordinary often sparks creativity, capable of bearing the extraordinary. In his latest, he doubles down on that idea, keenly aware that at some point, we become stories embellished and told to those who become our ghosts, or to those we become ghosts to. The Boy and the Heron bridges life and death through a timeless tale and visual oddities as it mourns past lives and begs we spend our own fully aware of the world around us, the ugly and the magnificent. 

The Boy and the Heron is available now. Watch the trailer below.

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Images courtesy of GKIDS.