The Boy and the Heron Review: Manages To Captivate The Viewer And Take Him Into A Dimension Where Time Stops
Cast: Yoshino Kimura, Kō Shibasaki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Where We Watched: In Theaters
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4.5/5 (four and a half stars)
Hayao Miyazaki confirms his status as a contemporary icon with The Boy and the Heron. Not a big surprise right? But repeating it never hurts, especially to remind us that in the desolate general picture of the seventh contemporary art, with the neo-centenary Disney in a very profound identity crisis, the most glorious symbol of the Japanese animation school is back there, to give us dreams and wonders. So hurry into the room because these two hours of adventure are a balm for the soul. 10 years after his last feature film for Studio Ghibli, master Hayao Miyazaki has returned to excite audiences by writing and directing The Boy and the Heron, a new animated film available in cinemas starting from 1 January 2024. A notable challenge for Lucky Red is to distribute the film during a holiday period, but also the best way to start the new year. The Boy and the Heron was previewed at Lucca Comics & Games 2023 on November 5th in the original language, filling the Cinema Astra theater and declaring it sold out.
The viewing was accompanied by a small parade of fans in cosplay who paid homage to some characters from Miyazaki’s best-known films, such as Howl’s Moving Castle, Porco Rosso, and Princess Mononoke. Watching The Boy and the Heron is an emotional experience from which one is unlikely to emerge unscathed: Hayao Miyazaki’s new film manages to touch deep chords and the experience in the theater makes it even more engaging, as if for all its duration (2 hours and 4 minutes) the world outside stopped. On the other, there is Hayao Miyazaki, who has announced his farewell to cinema eight times already, then always retracing his steps. The Boy and the Heron arrive after what had seemed, what in many ways was his film’s testament: The Wind Rises. In the time it took for this latest feature film to arrive in Italy, distributed in theaters by Lucky Red, Miyazaki found himself forced to retrace his steps for the ninth time: if his mortality allowed him, he would make another film.
The Boy and the Heron Review: The Story Plot
Mahito is a 12-year-old boy who, following the death of his mother, leaves Tokyo – now exhausted by the war – together with his father and his stepmother to move to a small town far from the capital. The young protagonist, who finds it difficult to settle in, sees his life turned upside down by a strange encounter: a gray heron who reveals an incredible truth to him. The Boy and the Heron is a story that travels on the thin line between reality and imagination, in an almost dreamlike dimension that overwhelms the viewer, enriched by Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack which is nothing short of spectacular. In the same way, it affects the young Mahito, who behind a strong armor – notable for his age – hides a sweet fragility. The protagonist, impossible not to love, manages to immediately gain entry into the sphere of Miyazaki’s “historical” characters, such as little Chihiro from Spirited Away, driven by courage and determination towards an unknown world, which oscillates between the disturbing and the wonderful.
It is perhaps one of the master’s most violent films, not only for the presence of some visually strong scenes but also for the choice of some themes such as war and death. It is a mature, adult film, which despite the fantastic component manages to be tremendously anchored into reality and to tell the pain as it is, without illusions or false hopes. It must be said that the first viewing of the film can prevent the viewer from grasping the work in its completeness, not due to speed but due to density. The Boy and the Heron almost seems like a universe suspended in time that wants to be admired in its fullness, but each scene is so rich in narrative and visual stimuli that the viewer is overwhelmed.
What may seem like slower moments, from a storytelling point of view, are a wonderful opportunity to observe the complex world created by Miyazaki, but the risk of getting lost is often just around the corner. It is a majestic work that can provide so much wonder, but often generates an overload in the soul of those who approach it, and the small but significant details can be savored and appreciated better with further and even more careful viewing. A first glance is not enough to absorb the complexity of the settings represented as well as that of the events surrounding the numerous characters involved: these are splendidly characterized and at times recall figures already encountered throughout Miyazaki’s filmography, especially about the role they play in the Mahito’s comparisons.
The Boy and the Heron Review and Analysis
Although The Boy and the Heron will not be Miyazaki’s last film, it seems in every way a farewell letter from the master (on a creative level, long live Hayao Miyazaki!). One of the reasons is the solemnity of the message that he wanted to convey primarily to his nephew – as he declared – but also to the same public that loved him throughout his splendid career: a story to be loved even when he is not there, it will be more, a purpose that is also revealed through particular plot choices, creating a real parallel with the reality of Hayao Miyazaki. Furthermore, The Boy and the Heron contains a very long series of homages and references to his filmography for Studio Ghibli, especially on a visual level and through particular animations that recall specific scenes from his other famous works. Attention, we are not talking about simple Easter eggs but about an essence: that of the master who wants to find his maximum expression here, as if Miyazaki had wanted to leave inside many small pieces of his soul to be relived through the memory of the most famous his works.
It has been said that this work is capable of remaining frozen in time – among other things a central concept in the story – and it is certainly capable of doing so thanks to the suspended dimension that Hayao Miyazaki managed to create with his team of professionals, but it’s not just about that. Despite the visible maturity of the work, in some ways not a day seems to have passed since the master’s last work, The Wind Rises, nor from those even before it. Fidelity to a timeless style, both graphic and directing, combines with those atmospheres dear to Miyazaki which makes his works many faces of a single prism that does not deteriorate despite the passage of time. In particular, the animation studio’s experiment with Earwig and the Witch by Gorō Miyazaki, makes the audience smile and almost reassures the public with the return of an aesthetic that recalls “the Ghibli of the past”.
And so in The Boy and the Heron, there is everything. Even too much. The most fascinating and complex element of the film also becomes its greatest limitation. It is a work that marks an unassailable artistic, visual, and conceptual maturity. But also, the need, or rather the eagerness, to still have so much to say and the awareness of having little time to do it. And therefore, more than ever, Miyazaki’s genius also becomes pure and magnificent chaos, in which the narrative, philosophical, and ideological material is so exaggerated as to disorientate. To be left forbidden and, in some cases, even to not allow a first and superficial understanding of its content. Perhaps, without knowing the style and experience of its author, risks losing part of its meaning. Lights and shadows of a Master. He directs an animated film of rare beauty, of pure and refined technique. A work entirely made by hand, simply extraordinary in every visual and aesthetic aspect.
From the simplest animations, capturing a daily routine or animal behavior, to incredibly detailed backgrounds. In between, the visionary and imaginative talent of a cinematic eye that captures an entire world. Indeed, more worlds. A vortex of colors, designs, and suggestions that contain the essence of classic animation, and which in some moments also mark its absolute pinnacle. The Boy is the Heron takes up many elements of Miyazaki’s life, making it the first piece of a story that brings the concept of memory to the center of the entire narrative process. Detached enough to foster an understanding of the total picture, he guides us inside a tower that hides another dimension, with this curious mutant heron acting as our guide.
There has been talking of a sort of parallel with the “Divine Comedy”, except that here there are no sinners but at most victims, chained to each other by a very particular deus ex machina. Simply sensational from a visual point of view, with a soundtrack that is not too invasive, The Boy and the Heron is permeated by the desire to awaken the child hidden in each of us, while telling us about the discovery of a world that is the secret mirror and unspeakable of human society. The themes of motherhood, conflict, as well as that of environmentalism, and the relationship with nature, of bonds between people, are all filtered through this childish vision, as has always been the case for Miyazaki. Often winking also at Lewis Carroll, at his imaginative mockery of Japanese society of which he has always been a constructive critic, Miyazaki reminds us of the problem of incommunicability, of altruism as an antidote to the evil that here too, in reality, it is carried forward by a plot in which a Manichean vision is avoided.
There is no real villain, as Miyazaki has always preferred, also infecting the West, but rather the consequences of actions faced either excessively lightly or without the appropriate evaluation tools. Although the protagonist (unlike almost all of his films) is not female, the centrality of the maternal figure remains preponderant as we follow the stubborn but unstoppable steps of Mahito, accompanied by this strange bird, halfway between a puffin and a village idiot. The wonder of nature cannot be missing, the vision of human life is undeniably linked to it in mysterious and complex ways. His return to the relationship between the human and the divine is also surprising, of which he gives us a highly sensitive analysis. At the end of these 125 minutes, only gratitude remains for having been lucky enough to have him in our world, in our time, to have learned so much about the real world following this great painter of imaginative worlds.
Like many of Miyazaki’s works, The Boy and the Heron is a marvel of technique. The animation of the fire scene that opens the film is something that goes beyond cinema and borders on pure pictorial art, with an incomparable visual and emotional power. Like the old god of his film, Miyazaki has come close to superhuman abilities in finding balance in the arrangement of his wooden blocks. Like his character, who is none other than him, he feels ever closer to the impossibility of maintaining this balance, of finding an heir. On a more immediate level, The Boy and the Heron is an environmentalist and pacifist story, which sometimes looks with disgust, with wonder at what makes humans human, highlighting the meanness and purity, already present in the very young protagonist.
The true beating heart of the film, however, is the awareness of being able to compare himself for a little while longer with a canon that he already knows will survive him, but which he will soon no longer be able to personally, jealously watch over. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the film is how Miyazaki, through his protagonist, identifies change as the path to take even if it is difficult to accept, even if it involves overcoming what we loved and is no longer there, Miyazaki who is the same time the one who remains in the past and the one who, film after film, moves towards the future, he has understood more than anyone else how necessary and painful it is to close the door of what has been behind us.
Hence the embarrassment in the face of his failure, because the only door that Miyazaki is unable to close is the one on his career, even if, above all, his audience and humanity remain deaf to his appeals, his cries. The Boy and the Heron is a complex film, rich in symbolism, which ends in a magical kingdom permeable to a dreamlike reality that is often tempted to psychoanalyze. Seeing it one feels a precise pain: that of the awareness of how much this beauty costs its creator in human, material, and moral terms, of how much each new Miyazaki film is torn from a past on which the door of History is closing very rapidly.
The Boy and the Heron Review: The Last Words
The Boy and the Heron is an understandable title, from the perspective of an Italian adaptation, but too simple and reductive to convey the complexity and abundance of the content of Hayao Miyazaki’s new work. A film that represents the sum of Maestro’s creative and artistic genius, which contains all the meaning and beauty of classic animation, and which in some moments also marks its absolute pinnacle. But also a chaotic and controversial feature film, in which Miyazaki tries to summarize everything. And a little too much. His cinema, Ghiblian cinema, and love towards friends, teachers, children, and grandchildren, of growth and of existence itself. With the result that I still want to say a lot, but in a short time. And I like to think that this is also a bit of how Hayao, in this phase of his life, will be experiencing cinema. To which he delivers How do you live? Not a will, but a precious legacy. A journey that unfortunately does not provide answers, but only one question, mysterious and immense: how will you live?
The Boy and the Heron Review: Manages To Captivate The Viewer And Take Him Into A Dimension Where Time Stops - Filmyhype
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Date Created: 2024-01-02 19:18
4.5
Pros
- Mahito among Miyazaki's best protagonists
- Engaging story
- Strong emotional charge
- Unforgettable soundtrack
Cons
- A first viewing is not enough to fully absorb the work
- Difficult to digest for a younger audience
