Review: 'The Boy and the Heron' is Hayao Miyazaki at his most beautifully elegiac
1)
The last moment in "The Boy and the Heron" is the simplest, loveliest, most quietly shattering thing. It could hardly be otherwise, being the final scene of purportedly the final work from the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. I'm' reluctant to say more, not just because the image itself defies description, as Miyazaki's' art often does, or because I'm' wary of spoilers since his teeming, restlessly inventive stories have long been liberated from the prison of narrative logic.
Let's say this parting shot feels like an end and a beginning, a departure and a return, a reminder of all the imaginative wonders that can spring from the dimmest recesses of a boy's memory. He may be learning to put away childish things, but the movie around him embraces them without fear or apology.
2)
The boy is named Mahito, and we meet him in 1943, on the terrible night his mother dies in a hospital fire in Tokyo. Amid a blur of slow-drifting embers and fast-moving bodies, he races to try and save her while air-raid sirens scream overhead. It's a wartime conflagration that will haunt Mahito throughout this gorgeous, so it's a thrilling movie, even after his father sends him a year later to live in the countryside with his stepmother-to-be, Natsuko.
As Mahito wanders to a strange new house and its lush, wooded surroundings, followed here and there by a bevvy of gossipy grannies, he can't shake his grief, his guilt or a startling hallucination of his mother rising, phoenix-like, from the flames.
3)
An interwar tale of creation and destruction, "The Wind Rises" ends with a fiery World War II vision leading seamlessly into "The Boy and the Heron's" harrowing opening moments. Some informed those moments of Miyazaki's' childhood memories:
He was only 3 when he and his family fled Tokyo, and the images of bombed-out, war-ravaged cityscapes never left him. (Miyazaki's' father worked at a company that manufactured aeroplane parts, a detail that the filmmaker has bequeathed to Mahito's' father in turn.)
4)
The semi-autobiographical touches are profoundly moving, though it would be a mistake to read too much into them, given that Miyazaki has never been impersonal. The movie's most piercing moment is at once fictional (one hopes) and tethered to painful, unfantastical reality:
Mahito, feeling hopeless and abandoned, suddenly lifts a stone and smashes it against the side of his head, drawing a cascade of blood and leaving a scar that lingers until the movie's end.
It's a startling instance of self-inflicted violence that speaks to the fearless, unsparing quality that has always been at the heart of Miyazaki's' work. His empathy with his characters is too profound to spare them the realities of violence and despair, just as he loves them too much to deny them the possibility of wonderment and joy.
5)
Mahito must figure out how to live through the present moment and how he will endure the trauma of war and the pain of his mother's death. But he must also determine how he will live in the future: what mothers play in a family that continues to survive and grow, and what he will be a young man and, before too long, an old one.
6)
Toward the movie's end, Mahito stumbles on a possible vision of his future, though the question of who this elder sage is — Natsuko's great-uncle? Jareth the Goblin King? Miyazaki himself? — may have multiple answers or none at all. But who the man is matters less than what he says: to seek balance in all things, live free from malice and do all that we can with the time given.
7)
As you leave "The Boy and the Heron," you may feel strangely bereft, emptied in a way that I suspect Miyazaki both intends and hopes to console us against. I think this is the meaning of that sad yet oddly capacious final image: For one fleeting, breathtaking moment, this magnificent artist clears the screen of all its wondrous sights and sounds, its imaginative detritus and rapturous flourishes — and calls on each of us, as best and as only we can, to fill this space anew.
Review: 'The Boy and the Heron' is Hayao Miyazaki at his most beautifully elegiac
Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron" records as Ghibli's highest-grossing in North America
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/2d5908560506f95e9923849e12c76dd6852d8ec5
Film director Hayao Miyazaki Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki's 2399 days "Professionals" "How do you live? (The Boy and the Heron)" 2023.12
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apPah-A1WGA
No2: Film director Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki's 2399 days "How do you live?" Takuya Kimura - Kenshi Yonezu 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBzr9F17yxo
Book "How do you live?" - Wikipedia
"How Do You Live?" is a Japanese novel by Genzaburo Yoshino, first published in 1937. The film depicts Junichi Honda, a 15-year-old boy nicknamed Koperu, and his uncle grappling with spiritual growth, poverty, and the overall human experience.
THE BOY AND THE HERON - Official Trailer (English)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBKXgjo_rFw
Kenshi Yonezu - Spinning Globe (Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and The Heron)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abKcYyQ1V7Y
The sky on the day I was born was high and clear
That day, I heard a voice patting my back and telling me to go.
We pass each other through the seasons, sometimes hurting others
Touching the light and stretching the shadow, the sky is even further away
I catch the wind and start running, crossing the rubble
Every day, I dream of someone waiting for me at the end of this road, shining a light.
Open the door now as if revealing a secret
I can't get enough of it and think about it, like spinning a globe
The person I loved went to a place where no one knows
With the same kind face that day, even now, I'm somewhere far away
I start singing in the rain, regardless of who's watching
I prayed that this path would continue, so I dreamed of meeting her again forever
Don't forget the secret you've grasped
Thinking until the end, like spinning a globe
It all starts with your own tiny, correct wishes.
I turn down the road, feeling lonely
I catch the wind and start running, crossing the rubble
Someone is waiting at the end of this road
I dream of shining light every day
Open the door now as if revealing a secret
The joy of touching hands and the sadness of letting go
I keep drawing without getting bored, like spinning a globe.
'The Boy and the Heron' by Hayao Miyazaki - 2023 -2h 4m - 7.6/10
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6587046/
Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron" wins Golden Globe Award
https://www.bbc.com/japanese/67909383
Best Animated Feature Film | 'The Boy and the Heron' | Oscars 2024 Press Room Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvAe9rWaSpY
Director Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron (Japanese title: How Do You Live?)" won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film (March 11, 2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvSnK4tBirI
