The Boy and the Heron

I don’t think I need to explain who Hayao Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli are. For decades, Miyazaki has built up a reputation as one of Japan’s greatest anime film directors, starting all the way back in 1979 with The Castle of Cagliostro and continuing through Studio Ghibli with such classics as My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service and the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away (also the highest-grossing Japanese film ever made until Mugen Train), to name a few. Following The Wind Rises in 2013, Miyazaki would announce his retirement from producing feature films due to his age, though this would be short-lived, as only three years later, after creating the short Boro the Caterpillar, he started work on his twelfth film, The Boy and the Heron (JP: Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka, lit. How Do You Live?). Notably, the film took seven years to produce and didn’t have a robust marketing campaign ahead of its Japanese premiere, opting instead for a single poster image.

The poster in question.

While I wouldn’t consider myself a hardcore Miyazaki fan, as I haven’t seen all of his films yet, I have seen enough that I understand his talent as a director and why his works are so beloved to this day. In fact, what grabbed our attention with seeing The Boy and the Heron while we could still catch it in a theater was that it received animation awards despite competing against the boundary-pushing Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to like The Boy and the Heron, considering the director’s track record, I found it lacking where it mattered most: the story.

During the Pacific War in Tokyo, Mahito Maki (Luca Padovan) loses his mother Hisako in a hospital fire. Mahito’s father, Shoichi (Christian Bale), marries another woman, Natsuko (Gemma Chan), and they evacuate to her rural estate, where Mahito encounters a grey heron that seems oddly fixated on him. After a fight at school, Mahito injures himself and, during his recovery, hears the heron (Robert Pattinson) say that his mother is still alive. After Natsuko saves him from a supernatural swarm of toads, Mahito crafts a bow and arrow. Shortly after finishing the arrow with a fallen feather that he grabbed from the heron, Mahito goes into the forest to search for Natsuki, who has disappeared, and, with elderly housemaid Kiriko (Florence Pugh) in tow, reaches a sealed tower constructed by his architect granduncle. Mahito is led inside by the heron, where he enters a world of supernatural wonder.

There’s no doubt that The Boy and the Heron has stunning animation. Everything is lovingly rendered in gorgeous traditional animation, which leads to very impressive effects like the flow of water, the flapping of wings, reflections and even the movement of fire. There are even points where it dips into a slightly different art style or feel vaguely reminiscent of Satoshi Kon’s work in its ability to blend dream and reality (though that’s not to say it has the same effect as Satoshi Kon’s work). You can tell that a lot of time and care went into the entire project, as every effect totally lands with incredible precision and certain elements, including the heron’s appearance, are thoughtfully controlled, as though Miyazaki got exactly what he wanted. There is at least one moment where it looks like Ghibli eased the process with CG, but it’s hardly noticeable and doesn’t take away from the film’s technical achievement. Since I watched the English dub, I also thought the voice actors all did a great job with their roles.

Luca Padovan does a good job as Mahito.

In an unfortunate twist, however, the beautiful animation can’t mask the messy storytelling that lies beneath. While the opening scene is very powerful and the first act opens up a good amount of potential for an equally powerful story, the plot loses its way in the second act onward, more precisely as soon as Mahito enters the tower. A slow beginning for the sake of setting everything up and establishing the protagonist’s “normal” is one thing, but the majority of the film continues this same slow pace to the point that I kept checking my watch and, eventually, more than one of us fell into a confused slumber. Unlike other Miyazaki films, I had a much harder time following what exactly was going on, as it constantly throws new ideas at the audience without fully elaborating on any of them or even properly explaining the rules of its world. Though the pacing does pick up in the third act, it gets even messier, as it's much clearer at that point that the characters’ actions don’t quite line up with their motivations and certain lines feel wildly out of character and come equally out of nowhere. By the end, certain plot threads, including one about Mahito’s mother(!), have an anticlimactic resolution and the overall payoff feels rushed and unearned.

While it’s clear that The Boy and the Heron has a message, whether it’s one about grief and loss, as I interpreted as its intention, or, as some have interpreted, a meta commentary about Miyazaki’s career, the film fails in its delivery. The lack of cohesion within its story doesn’t really help, as instead it feels like Mahito goes from place to place, situation to situation, with little rhyme or reason. I didn’t want a flashing neon sign pointed at the deeper meanings, but it’s frustrating when you finish a story and you can’t really remember much of what happened and even when you do, you can’t explain the why. Perhaps I didn’t quite pick up on the intended symbolism in either case, as I found it rather esoteric, even for Miyazaki.

As much as I don’t like saying this, I can’t really recommend The Boy and the Heron. I appreciate its artistry and consider it a technical achievement in modern traditional animation, but its disparate elements don’t quite come together in a satisfying way. Feel free to give it a try if you’re a diehard Miyazaki fan, but I would otherwise suggest watching his other works or even other Studio Ghibli films (like The Cat Returns) instead.