You Don’t Need to “Get” Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘The Boy and the Heron’

By Turi Sioson

I spent a lot of my adolescence confused. Like any hip, art-loving parents, mine liked to share their eclectic tastes with me, even thought it important to do so. As a toddler, I was shown Kill Bill and had regular dance sessions to funk classics like The Meters; a little later, books meant for kids twice my age got handed to me, even when I struggled to keep up with their content. It was all a little like poetry to me: deeply moving, but for what reason I couldn’t pinpoint. Perhaps the most fruitful and wonderful of my early exposure to perplexing media was Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films.

Undoubtedly visually gorgeous, emotionally stirring, and thematically rich, they are just as frequently bewildering. Though I couldn’t yet parse the ecological implications of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) or fully relate to the growing pains in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), the worlds and characters Miyazaki created thoroughly resonated with me in childhood. Poetry was the same for me at that age — I adored the Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin my dad was reading, but I didn’t really know what their poems were saying. I just knew what they were making me feel.

In nearly all of his works, Miyazaki has a penchant for leaving out the kind of details that most American filmmakers would never dream of skipping over, in favor of letting viewers work through the story and characters themselves. It’s no surprise to me that Spirited Away (2001) was able to latch onto Western audiences so well — plot-wise, it’s one of the more easily coherent of his films (despite it being one of the weirder ones), following a fairly traditional story structure with tropes that are more recognizable to foreign audiences.

But it’s difficult to describe The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki’s newest film, released on December 8, in much the same way it’s difficult to describe a poem. There are several moving parts, most of them slippery and subtle; characters and moments appear out of nowhere and subsequently disappear without a lot of fuss or ceremony (yet never without a touch of dramatic flair). I went into the theater blind, having seen nothing but the original Japanese poster, a list of the GKIDS English cast, and a handful of random stills. I was under the impression that the film closely followed the book it’s inspired by, Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live? (also the film’s Japanese title). In my ignorance, I was perplexed by how different the story was from my expectations, yet I was equally awed in a way I hadn’t experienced since childhood.

The master animator’s “final” film — a title unlikely to stick, according to long-time Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, who shared last fall that the director is already working on a new project, and the studio’s New Year’s letter, which stated that Miyazaki would return to work on January 5 — follows 12-year-old Mahito as he struggles with the loss of his mother in an unfamiliar town away from WWII–stricken Tokyo. At his new stepmother’s rural estate, he crosses paths with a mysterious heron, who informs him that his mother is still alive. From there, he enters an unfamiliar world where he must grapple with death, family, and persevering life.

Throughout the film’s 124-minute runtime, Miyazaki presents a number of questions, though the most prevalent is true to its original title. As Mahito meets new characters, from a wounded pelican (Willem Dafoe) to a Parakeet King (Dave Bautista), and is faced with life-altering decisions, the question “how do you live?” is silently asked again and again. The answer is unique and complex for each of the strange, unfamiliar creatures, though there is seemingly little connection between their experiences.

Perhaps this is part of why it isn’t as easy to ground yourself in the narrative (though this difficulty was eased upon my second watch, when I was able to slow down and pay more attention to details) and why it's become such a polarizing film. There's a level of trust that Miyazaki hands us with The Boy and the Heron, laying out raw emotion and uncertainty with the assumption that we will be able to take — and more importantly feel — what he gives us as it is, without reaching for any larger meaning within the plot.

In a wonderful twist of tone, the film also carries a surprising amount of humor. Miyazaki is not particularly known to throw in more than one or two jokes into his scripts, but The Boy and the Heron is almost as much a comedy as it is a drama. The gray heron himself is outwardly ridiculous, his clumsy maneuvers and nasally voice in both Japanese and English inviting you to stifle giggles into your hand; the Parakeet King and his army of colorful, heavy-breathing subjects are equally absurd, and if you’re watching the English dub, you might find yourself bursting into laughter over Christian Bale’s mixture of a transatlantic and New York accent as his character, Shoichi, promises that he’ll “get vengeance” for Mahito, his son, over a supposed school scuffle.

It’s a seemingly odd fit for a movie so stuffed with weighty, grief-ridden questions and musings. Yet to me, it felt strangely appropriate. The spirit of the film shape-shifts along with the tone, conjuring a realness that balances the Ghibli dramatics with a taste of Miyazaki’s (and our) world. Perhaps this is why The Boy and the Heron felt so immediately close to me, as I recognized the oxymoronic dichotomy that lives within my own personality.

It’s unlike any Ghibli film that has come before, in part due to the personal connections and history Miyazaki has intertwined with the movie’s story, characters, and world. Though it’s loosely based on Yoshino’s novel, The Boy and the Heron is rich with allusions to Miyazaki’s and Ghibli’s past. There are various callbacks to Miyazaki’s filmography, as the wara wara are reminiscent of Princess Mononoke’s kodama, and many of the shots bring to mind Spirited Away’s flying paper scraps, Mononoke’s supernatural archery, and Howl’s Moving Castle fire and magic. In an interview with IndieWire, Suzuki detailed just how personal the story is: “Miyazaki is Mahito, [the late director and Ghibli co-founder Isao] Takahata is the great uncle, and the gray heron is me,” he said. Yet, Miyazaki veils this representation well, reminding me of the way so many of my favorite poems carry a secret intimacy between poet and friend, lover, family, or place that the reader isn’t expected to understand. Instead, we are meant to identify with and perhaps even pick apart bits of this shared intimacy, yet there’s an element of connection that is meant to never be fully recognized.

And I’m not made uncomfortable by that. To experience the emotion, to walk through a poet’s memory, I don’t need to know everything that’s going on. Take Frank O’Hara’s famous “The Day Lady Died”: in classic O’Hara fashion, he name-drops streets and shops, people and books that the average reader knows absolutely nothing about. Who’s Patsy? What does it matter what Miss Stillwagon’s first name is, “once heard” by the speaker? And yet we feel his grief, the interruption of his everyday, only through these trivial and confusing details, which build a sense of normalcy and ordinary busyness that transport us to our own daily lives and connect us to a simple language of loss.

In much the same way, Miyazaki crafts a visual, moving poem with The Boy and the Heron, bringing his personal connections and memories to us in a jumbled, vibrant way, and still we are inspired to reflect on and dissect ourselves despite our confusion. The sparkle in Mahito’s eyes as he eats the bread his mother made for him as a child is moving — I can’t be the only one who thought of the classic afternoon snack of bread and butter, which seemed in childhood like such a delicacy. It’s not a detail that is particularly important to the narrative, but it’s a moment that shines emotionally. When we realize that the heron is actually a small man in a magical skin of some sort, it’s perplexing, maybe even muddling to the rest of the story. But how unnerving, how wonderfully intriguing — it engages our senses and gets us to feel our curiosity in a tangible way, something I find has been dulled with the constant stream of ankle-deep media that oversaturates my day-to-day.

When I was a kid, it was easy for me to give confusing content a chance, since nearly everything in the world was strange and unclear to me. But as I’ve gotten older and more prone to scrolling on TikTok for hours at a time, my patience for things I don’t immediately understand has worn thin. It happens to all of us, though I suspect it’s now a much faster process for younger generations. The Boy and the Heron requires you to slow down, as so many Ghibli films do, but it also demands an openness that many of us have not fully tapped into since childhood.

Though he’s one of the titular characters, it's not immediately or even ultimately clear what the heron’s purpose is. Where did he come from? Was he originally human? Why is he so well-known and seemingly significant to the characters of the other world? The film’s English title leads us to believe that the heron’s presence should have some grand justification, yet by the end we’re still unsure of what that is. The same can be said of many of the supporting characters, including Mahito’s stepmother, Natsuko. Her feelings toward Mahito are not easy to figure out, nor is the extent of her knowledge of the other world. None of these somewhat incomprehensible aspects bothered me, but such questions saturated negative reviews from long-time fans and first-time Ghibli viewers alike, along with notes of holes and inconsistencies in the magic and logic. In fact, this is the only negative opinion I’ve seen of the movie — that it wasn’t understood, that it’s confusing and unclear, that too many characters and plot points go unexplained.

But ultimately, none of this matters. The heron is simply there, guiding Mahito and acting as a classic Miyazaki companion with whom the protagonist learns and grows. His interactions with Mahito help us understand the boy’s personality, help introduce us to the Granduncle’s (Mark Hamill) world, and put us in the realm of the unknown. Natsuko’s connection to Mahito grounds us in the familial turmoil that Mahito is struggling through, without ever having to spell it out. Though you don’t really know what’s going on with these characters, you identify with their struggles and personalities; though you’re unsure of how things got to where they are, you become immersed in the world and its magic. You find yourself mirroring the emotion that runs through everything in the film, from the alluring visuals to composer Joe Hisaishi’s scarce, poignant soundtrack (which includes a birthday present to Miyazaki as the score's main theme, adding yet another personal layer to the movie).

More familiar to us, though, the film marks a return to the fully hand-drawn style that Ghibli has long been championed for. Even as they transitioned into digital animation beginning with Spirited Away, the studio’s style retained this early aesthetic, as base illustrations were drawn by hand. With The Boy and the Heron, Ghibli’s traditional cel animation returns the visuals to the sharp and vibrant, akin to the lush Princess Mononoke (1997). Unlike the rounded, somewhat over-glossed look of Miyazaki’s preceding films — most notably Ponyo (2008) and The Wind Rises (2013) — which was a byproduct of the CGI used, The Boy and the Heron boasts crisp lines and appropriately muted landscapes, giving way to a fluidness of movement and a pleasing style that was somewhat stunted within the last few projects by 3D computer animation.

While the rendering and some effects were done digitally, the technology was used complementary to the traditional drawings and paintings, lending a realness to the animation that makes the whimsy and wonder of the alternate world all that more comfortable, if you're open to it. Like a Mary Oliver poem stuffed with scenic, enchanting imagery and quiet epiphanies, The Boy and the Heron wants you to pay attention, invites you to look at the world it’s painted for you and be inspired, afterward, to tilt your head up and see the film’s magic reflected back at you. You don’t need coherence for that.

It's not about understanding the at-times flighty narrative, or recognizing the significance of each and every character, but about the way The Boy and the Heron makes you feel. Where does it light up your senses? What line rings in your ears on the way home? At which point do you feel the urge to cry? To live? It's a message that has been consistently planted in the films spanning Miyazaki's long career, of how the intangible effects of the things we do, the people we meet, dreams we experience, words we read, and movies we pour over stay with us even after they are gone and forgotten. How much of your own life do you understand? Now how much of it do you hold dear to you anyway? The Boy and the Heron, in all its marvel and uncertainty, is equally a poem of celebration and grief, and I will carry its ever-puzzling story until all that is left is the emotion it pulled from me. ♦