Bird’s-eye view
REPORTS OF HAYAO Miyazaki’s retirement have proved greatly exaggerated. The legendary 82-year-old Japanese director — responsible for anime masterpieces such as Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle — has supposedly called it quits no fewer than seven times, before promptly un-retiring each time. Most recently, he claimed his final film would be The Wind Rises, an elegiac 2013 wartime drama. But sure enough, he soon found himself tempted back to the director’s chair with The Boy And The Heron, a very loose adaptation of the 1937 novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, about a child in post-War Japan who befriends a talking grey heron and enters a magical dreamworld. So what enticed him out of drawing a well-deserved pension?
“I think he felt that he is coming to the end of his life,” explains Miyazaki’s producer and close confidant Toshio Suzuki, who co-founded Studio Ghibli with the director in 1985. “He was looking back at his journey, and he felt the need to make a film out of that journey.” The reclusive filmmaker’s work has always been personal — multiple characters from his movies are loosely based on his mother, including Yasuko from Totoro and Toki from Ponyo — but The Boy And The Heron very much tells the Miyazaki story. “I would say that the basic story is based on his whole life, but then he made that into something that could be more accessible and entertaining,” Suzuki explains. “Because I’ve known him for 45 years now, I could tell which character is based on which actual person.” The ‘boy’ of the title is partly based on Miyazaki, while Suzuki notes, through his interpreter, “I’m the heron.”