The Boy and Heron (2023): a dazzling autobiographical lesson in grief

Hayao Miyazaki’s supposedly final film, The Boy and the Heron, is a stunningly beautiful and personal view into the director’s life and work. The images of war and death it features are heart wrenching, yet, in typical Ghibli fashion the film remains intensely beautiful, both in sight and sound.

The film follows Mahito Maki, who, after losing his mother during the Asia-Pacific War, moves from Tokyo to the countryside with his father. There he discovers a derelict tower inhabited by a talking heron, and through exploring it, enters a spiritual world filled with danger.

The Boy and the Heron is, ultimately, just as much a film about Hayao Miyazaki as it is Mahito Maki – a reflection on Miyazaki’s life’s work. It feels as if Miyazaki is examining his own career as an animator through Mahito’s story. The beauty and childlike wonder that is evoked in Ghibli films is a tragic product of the lost childhood of people like Hayao Miyazaki. He described in an interview that the scene of the burning hospital, so vividly captured at the start of the film, was one of his earliest childhood memories

Whilst the theme of grief prevails throughout The Boy and the Heron, I was particularly struck by its presence within the very makeup of the two worlds Mahito explores. The emotional inversion that grief engenders in the everyday is outwardly expressed in the antipode of the fantastical world of the Heron. Most notably, the all-consuming flames that take Himi’s life are, in the Heron’s world, protective ones that secure the passage of innocent souls. Whilst both the real and fantastical worlds isolate Mahito in his grief, only the latter gives him the tools to overcome it. As Himi wields the fire that consumed her as a tool of succour, Mahito is able to wield and confront his grief in a world where death predicates life, harmless birds are violent oppressors and enemies are friends.

The liminality of spaces within the world of the Heron also forms an important aspect of Mahito’s journey to acceptance.

At every turn he is faced with depictions of life and death, entangled and indistinguishable from each other; it is often difficult to tell which characters Mahito meets are corporal or spiritual. In his depictions of liminality Miyazaki appears to have taken particular inspiration from the work of the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin and his series of Isle of the Dead paintings.

The scenes at the golden gates just after Mahito’s arrival in the spirit realm particularly stuck with me, the shining figure of the gates with the dark cypress trees swaying silently in the background was striking. As Mahito passes into the cave between the two, the very fringe between life and death, he encounters the yawning void at the end of life and almost passes through himself. Emerging from the cave he is met with the presence of life, in the form of Kiriko, and death, in the form of the spirits, but remains unfazed having now seen the end for himself – thus allowing him to overcome the first stage of grief, denial.

Miyazaki and Joe Hisaishi continue their fruitful relationship in The Boy and the Heron with a simple and evocative soundtrack that really lets the film breathe. The simplicity of Hisaishi’s score also allows the foley to shine, the sound of geta on the wooden floors of the temple contrasts the harsh clack on Shoichi’s shoes on stone.

Whilst the production of visuals and sound in Ghibli films has previously been simultaneous, The Boy and the Heron defies this. Hisaishi was only asked to compose a score once the film itself was finished, this places Miyazaki’s story at centre stage with Hisaishi composing beautifully around it.

In a recent interview he noted that it was “a chance for me to move myself close to what Miyazaki had intended”. Miyazaki’s relationships shine through the length and breadth of the film, the main theme ‘Ask Me Why’, originally composed by Hisaishi as a birthday gift to Miyazaki, is especially touching. It felt the piece was a celebration of decades of friendship and a lamentation that it need come to an end, its almost obituarial character continues the theme of life and death elegantly.

The third act, whilst certainly one of the most cluttered and beguiling in any Ghibli film, also feels like the most personal view we’ve ever had into Miyazaki himself. Whilst the Parakeet King and what Wendy Ide unfairly described as “some kind of high stakes jenga game” were stories that were introduced and concluded swiftly I think they formed a perfect conclusion to the dialogue that Miyazaki has spent decades contributing to. The controlled chaos of Great Uncle’s white blocks represent a world that was teetering on the edge of destruction, much as Miyazaki’s world was with the spectre of nuclear annihilation looming large over Japan. Mahito’s journey to acceptance is not just that of the death of his mother, but Miyazaki himself coming to terms with the grief of losing a nation’s future. This is why Mahito’s act of rejecting ultimate power in favour of an imperfect but peaceful existence is so heroic.

In that sense, Mahito is also an enviable figure, he is able to overcome his trauma, come face to face with the sorrow of the past and choose to face reality. Mahito is able to do so because he has the closure that Miyazaki never got – he is able to spend some final moments with his mother. The scene where she makes bread with butter and strawberry jam for him was particularly emotive, you could feel Miyazaki’s desire, more than anything, to taste his mother’s cooking just one more time, and the pain of being unable to do so.

The Boy and the Heron is the most reflective, personal film we have ever seen from Studio Ghibli. It touches heartbreakingly on the sorrow and loss that characterises the childhood of Miyazaki’s generation, but also, as Rodrigo Cokting pointed out in his review, it is a call to action to younger generations. We are once again in a time where grief is permeating our world and Miyazaki is calling on us to make it a better place. Or at least, as the film’s original Japanese title (How do you live?) suggests, prescribing a way in which we can overcome the grief that he could not.

Images shared by Solomon Clarke.