The Boy and The Heron

Directed by Miyazaki Hayao

Released in the UK in 2023
Official Website 

Review by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif

The Boy and The Heron is the latest film directed by Miyazaki Hayao. Released in Japan as How Do You Live? (Kimitachi wa do ikiru ka), the film might not be, as previously speculated, Miyazaki's final film, but it certainly feels like a swan song and an homage to his illustrious career and canon of work.

The setting is 1940s wartime Japan and the protagonist is Mahito (voiced by Santoki Soma in the Japanese version and Luca Padovan in the English dub), whose mother is killed in an airstrike on a hospital in Tokyo. His father (voiced by Kimura Takuya and Christian Bale) remarries Mahito’s mother’s sister, Natsuko (Kimura Yoshino and Gemma Chan) and relocates them to her remote, sprawling country estate, which is staffed by a group of tobacco-obsessed, crone-like ‘grannies’. The grieving, unsettled Mahito finds himself haunted by an eerie talking grey heron (Suda Masaki and Robert Pattinson) who keeps insisting that his ‘presence is requested’. When the pregnant Natsuko vanishes into the ruins of a mysterious, bricked-up tower in the woods, Mahito follows the heron into a strange and fantastical world in search of her.

In many ways, this film feels like a spiritual successor to Spirited Away, with a troubled young protagonist who is changed by a rescue mission into a supernatural world. But while Spirited Away has very clear emotional beats and a linear character arc, The Boy and the Heron’s plot feels more meandering and disjointed. The first act, which follows Mahito’s arrival at the estate and his attempts to settle into his new life, drags on for slightly too long, so that by the time we get to the action, the scenes in the world within the tower feel rushed and almost like an afterthought. Characters like the Parakeet King (Kunimura Jun and Dave Bautista) and the tower master (Hiho Shohei and Mark Hamill) are introduced late in the film, and key stakes and elements are crammed, in an exposition-heavy manner, into a slightly unwieldy third act, making the story feel cluttered. The hurried pacing also means that the ending feels slightly abrupt. The ambiguities of the story itself are often confusing, and I found I enjoyed the film more when I stopped trying to make too much sense of it.

But perhaps this was the point. This is a story about grieving, and grief is messy and disjointed, especially from the perspective of a traumatised young boy. The film’s often haphazard structure embodies this ambiguity, as well as the dream-like logic of the world in the tower, a world that exists outside of space and time. Unlike the spirit world of Spirited Away, the setting has no clear rules or contained limits and opens itself up to an infinite range of interpretations - we never learn, for instance, the real origins of the structure that became the tower. This accentuates the story’s sense of wistful, whimsical beauty, making it something between a fairy tale and an allegory. 

The film’s surrealism is emphasised by its lush, gorgeous animation. From the nightmarish, fiery backdrop of war torn Tokyo with its burning sky and blurry figures, to the haunting, eclectic, and vibrantly coloured landscapes of the world in the tower, every frame feels like stepping into a watercolour painting.

Hisaishi Joe complements the dreamy visuals and the tone of the story with a score that is less grand and cinematic than it is melancholic and ponderous. 

Particularly within the tower, there is a jarring shift between the stylistic characteristics and motifs of the different locations, from the misty waterways occupied by ghostly boats to the busy and overly saturated home of the giant parrots. The inhabitants of the tower, too, range from the innocent to the grotesque, represented on one end by the smiling, spirit-like warawara and on the other by the giant, carnivorous parrots, who are both cartoonish and menacing, their war-like king calling to mind the militaristic regimes of the era. In the middle of this dichotomy are the pelicans, who go from antagonistic to pitiful as Mahito learns their story. But all the creatures of the tower are tragic in their own ways.

The characters are memorable and larger than life, sometimes bombastic and other times touching - but I wish they’d been given more space and time to shine. We get a clear insight into Mahito, our audience surrogate, on his journey from apathy to defiance, as well as into Natsuko, who is torn between her desire to be his mother and her guilt about not being able to live up to her sister’s memory. But others, like the fire-maiden Himi (voiced by Aimyon and Karen Fukuhara), the tough-talking fisherwoman Kiriko (Shibasaki Ko and Florence Pugh), and the mysterious tower master, fall to the wayside slightly. The highlight for me was the titular heron, who evolves from a sinister, otherworldly trickster to a comedic, goblin-like figure, voiced impressively (and unrecognizably) in the English dub by Robert Pattinson.

There is an autobiographical lens through which one can view the film, which sheds light on and reframes its many eccentricities. A lot of the story’s elements are inspired by Miyazaki’s own childhood, growing up in wartime Japan with a father who manufactured fighter planes, as Mahito’s father does. It feels like a very personal film, one which looks back reflectively while also looking ahead with hope and trepidation, as though the 82-year-old Miyazaki is grappling with the end of his career. It’s easy to see him in the character of the tower master, who seeks a successor to take ownership of the world he’s created and nurtured. Similarly, the tower world itself, full of beauty and horror and absurdity, populated by unusual, inexplicable characters, feels symbolic of Miyazaki’s filmography.

Fittingly, then, the film is full of nods to Miyazaki’s other works. The anthropomorphised animals, trapped in an unnatural world where they’re forced into violence in order to survive represent the struggle between man and the natural world seen in Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The enchanted tower is reminiscent of Laputa in Castle in the Sky or Howl’s castle in Howl’s Moving Castle. The film seems meta-textually aware of these parallels, even in its casting - the voice actors for Mahito’s father Shoichi in the original Japanese, English dub, and even Spanish dub all previously voiced Howl in Howl’s Moving Castle. For viewers like myself, who grew up on Studio Ghibli films, it’s strikingly nostalgic and feels like a triumphant culmination of years of storytelling.

The Boy and the Heron is a film that perhaps needs to be watched a second time in order to be fully appreciated, or one that must be allowed to sit in its audiences’ mind before its potency is realised. Like the nebulous tower world, it explores a number of themes. Grief is at the heart of it: grief for loss of loved ones, grief for endings, and grief for the fleeting nature of imagined worlds.

In many ways, the Japanese title - taken from a 1937 children’s book by Yoshino Genzaburo, which appears in-universe as a gift to Mahito from his mother - more accurately captures the feel of the story than the English one does. While The Boy and the Heron emphasises the fantasy adventure elements, How Do You Live poses a question to the audience, which the film seeks to answer.