Chicago Film Festival 2023: The Boy and the Heron is (another) moving capstone to Miyazaki’s career

Courtesy Studio Ghibli

Hayao Miyazaki has never been good at saying goodbye. The legendary Japanese animator and Studio Ghibli co-founder has “retired” no less than four times, always returning with more fantastical, increasingly self-reflective work. Before the 82-year-old’s new film The Boy and the Heron had even screened for non-Japanese audiences, Ghibli executive Junichi Nishioka was on the red carpet assuring reporters that Miyazaki already has ideas for a new film.

Regardless of whether The Boy and the Heron marks the true end of the auteur’s illustrious career, knowing you’re witnessing one of our greatest living directors’ final movies for the first time is an inherently emotional experience. Miyazaki, too, is profoundly aware of his mortality. Whereas his previous film (2013’s The Wind Rises) was a sobering look back at his fraught legacy, his latest finds him pointing the lens back at the audience he’ll leave behind. Inexplicably renamed The Boy and the Heron for its international release, it’s far better represented by its original Japanese title: How Do You Live?

Like The Wind Rises before it, The Boy and the Heron is rooted in Japanese history—more specifically, during World War II. It’s 1944, and 13-year-old Mahito is reeling from the death of his mother, killed in a post-bombing hospital fire a year earlier. Mahito’s father Shoichi—a munitions factory owner like Miyazaki’s own father—has remarried his late wife’s already-pregnant younger sister Natsuko, moved Mahito from his Tokyo home, and left him with minimal company in an isolated country estate belonging to his mom’s side of the family. When he’s not haunted by dreams of his anguished mother rising from flames like a phoenix, he’s trailed by a strange heron who taunts him with her cries. 

The first stretch of The Boy and the Heron is startling in its stillness. In contrast to the restless, effervescent heroines of Miyazaki classics like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, Mahito moves through his new surroundings with guarded remove. Although Miyazaki continues to innovate, utilizing techniques like slow-motion and POV shots for the first time in his career, the spare movement and still backdrops of these early scenes recall early Ghibli fare.

Eventually, Mahito is drawn towards the one forbidden place within his new home: A sealed-off tower created by a distant relative who “read too many books and went insane.” After following Natsuko inside one day, he finally comes face to face with that irritating heron, who (spoiler alert) isn’t a heron at all. In reality, he’s a prickly Danny Devito lookalike from another world who draws our young hero into his realm with the promise that his mother is still alive, waiting to be rescued.

The Boy and the Heron may start slow, but the kinetic back half finds Mahito traversing Miyazaki’s most out-there fantasy world yet (and that’s saying a lot). Events unfold with the logic of a dream or a child’s imagination, the strange beings and fellow humans he encounters alternating between clear metaphors and utterly abstract creations. Amid that elegant chaos, longtime Ghibli fans will be able to recognize long-running Miyazaki motifs (Formidable grannies! Appetizing meals! Flight metaphors!).

Still, Miyazaki has always been a more complicated artist than the cutesy Ghibli aesthetics that sell plushies and generate viral social media posts. He’s at once a humanist and a cynic, grappling with what it means to let your dedication to making groundbreaking art consume your life, while humanity wreaks irreversible havoc on the world through war and greed.

Miyazaki’s latest film sometimes feels like several movies crammed into one, stretched a bit too thin for his creative vision and weighty philosophical musings to coalesce as impeccably as his most memorable films. The offscreen resonance of an aging master’s rush to get all that he can across onscreen, knowing that what time he has will never be enough, is what ties The Boy and the Heron together. 

When the architect of the dying fantasy world Mahito has traveled across tells him, “There is work to be done,” it’s impossible not to read the scene as Miyazaki speaking to the generations following him, now tasked with the impossible task of figuring out how to live in an unruly, contradictory world. The auteur knows he hasn’t solved that dilemma, but I’m grateful he’s still urging us to try.