The Boy and the Heron, review: this Studio Ghibli swansong may be its finest film to date
Hayao Miyazaki is 82 years old, and while the master animator keeps claiming to have retired, fortunately he can’t seem to quit. The co-founder of Japan’s Studio Ghibli has formally announced that he would step back from directing three times in his career, following the release of Princess Mononoke in 1997, Spirited Away in 2001, and The Wind Rises in 2013. But each time he was coaxed back to work a year or two later, by some new idea for a film that burningly insisted on its own existence.
Yet while all three of those previous final films could have served as a grand, closing artistic statement, The Boy and the Heron is very different. In fact, in almost every respect – and despite its ravishing command of the hand-drawn medium to which Miyazaki has cleaved for the last 60 years – it feels like the least final film ever made.
Like Spirited Away, it’s a fantasy adventure in which a sullen child on the brink of their teens – here Mahito Maki (voiced by Soma Santoki), who flees Tokyo with his father during the Second World War – is half-tempted, half-frightened into a bizarre alternate realm, teeming with eccentric creatures and crammed with wondrous sights.
But where that Oscar-winning international breakthrough drew heavily on Japan’s own rich Buddhist and Shinto heritage, the folklore underpinning The Boy and the Heron is crazily sui generis: it rushes and sparkles and sploshes like a child’s imagination, making the sort of synaptic leaps in both image-making and storytelling that should be impossible for an adult brain to pull off. Yet though it may be Miyazaki’s strangest and freest work to date, Ghibli fans will note that it circles back to a number of themes and concerns that have cropped up throughout his previous 11 features: a lost child’s odyssey; the re-greening of a broken or abandoned world; and echoes of his own wartime childhood.
The last of those rears up immediately, in an astonishingly animated air-raid opening sequence, in which the young Mahito fights through panicked crowds in the blazing, ash-choked streets. The death of his mother in the attack forces a relocation to the country, where the lonely Mahito is pestered by a talking grey heron (Masaki Suda): the creature leads the boy to a deserted tower which leads in turn to a secret kingdom where, apparently, his mother can be found still alive.
It’s a place of vast, mirror-clear seas and crumbling chateaus, where ferocious pelicans feast on adorable marshmallowy critters known as warawara – cousins of My Neighbour Totoro’s soot sprites and Princess Mononoke’s kodama – a fire princess known as Himi (voiced by the singer Aimyon) sparks memories of Mahito’s late mother, and everyone steers clear of a vaguely Germanic-looking army of giant, man-eating parakeets. (Ghibli’s longstanding gift for blending the funny and the unsettling may have never found purer expression than in these boggle-eyed, feathery nightmares.)
Mahito’s adventures here are breathlessly thrilling, but also troubling, like an uneasy dream – and in its own dreamy way, the film resists analysis, preferring instead to move and amaze its audience on levels just beyond their cognitive reach. In its giddy resistance to being pinned down, it reminds you of Miyazaki himself: the stern traditionalist still delightedly pushing back the bounds of his craft.
Cert tbc, 124 mins. Screening at the London Film Festival. Cinemas from Boxing Day.