‘How do you live?’ That is the Japanese title of this return-from-retirement film by acclaimed Japanese animator, filmmaker and manga artist Hayao Miyazaki.
And how does a boy do so, carrying the grief of losing his mother, and the guilt of not having been able to save her (which he relives every night), even as he watches his father settle into his new life and new wife? All against the backdrop of World War II and its mounting shadows over the people of Japan.
The most autobiographical of Miyazaki’s films, The Boy and the Heron gives Mahito (Padovan) – like similar stories about grieving children – a world of vivid fantasy that merges seamlessly into his grim reality. A magical interlude that will help Mahito – and, consequently, the others around him – move on.
While the Boy and the Heron got this year’s Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, it isn’t the best of Miyazaki and the story tends to plod through the last 30 minutes of its pretty long length of 120-minute plus. There are just too many characters, in the real world and the one Mahito has tumbled into, that Miyazaki has juggling. The birds, especially, don’t have it easy, being either menacing, vicious or man-eaters.
Which is why the film’s English title is such a misnomer, as there is really little ‘and’ about the boy, that is Mahito, and the heron (Pattinson). Once Mahito and his father Shoichi (Bale) have moved from Tokyo to the countryside after his mother’s death in a fire at her factory, it is clear from the start that the heron does not have good intentions.
It mocks Mahito, it pecks at both his grief and his guilt, and it leads him to the forbidden tower on the house grounds that has a not-so-nice family legend attached to it. So of course Mahito finds himself there, and the rest of his journey follows.
Of the people he meets there, who all have some link or the other to his real world, the most impressive is Kiriko (Pugh), a daredevil sailor who hunts so that the “dead” who can’t hunt have something to feed on.
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As Mahito finds himself saved by her, and others such as Himi (Fukuhara), and goes on to set free others like his great granduncle (Hamill), who is the master of that forbidden tower – and we keep rushing down corridors “whose stones are angry” – Mahito himself at one point comments: “I have come through this passage before.”
So have we, so have we.
The Boy and the Heron movie director: Hayao Miyazaki
The Boy and the Heron voice cast: Luca Padovan, Robert Pattinson, Florence Pugh, Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill
The Boy and the Heron movie rating: 3 stars
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