THE BOY AND THE HERON It used to be that directing movies was a young man’s game, avocation for raging bulls, armed only with a whip, achair and their own ferocious arrogance. But many of 2023’s most striking films have been made by directors who have maintained dogged independence and epic visions well into their eighties: Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, Scorsese’s …Flower Moon and this month Ridley Scott’s Napoleon.
You might struggle with the idea that aman who has spent his career drawing wide-eyed toddlers, giant teddy bears, teenage witches and flying pigs belongs in this company, but Hayao Miyazaki may well prove to be the greatest of them all. Now aged 82, The Boy And The Heron looks to be his final film –though seasoned Miyazaki-heads will know he has been threatening retirement since the late 20th century. It begins, once again, in the primal Miyazaki scene. In 1943, Mahito is a 12-year-old boy, terrified by the firebombing of Tokyo, helpless as his mother’s hospital is incinerated. His father, who like Miyazaki’s own, is an aircraft manufacturer, evacuates the family to the countryside where he hopes to start anew family. Mahito’s new mum turns out to be his dead mother’s younger sister –and she’s expecting ababy. Mahito doesn’t take the news well and prompted by aghastly grey heron who insists his mother is still alive, finds refuge in a mysterious tower, supposedly built by his great uncle, in the woods near his new house.
The tower turns out to be astrange wrinkle in time and space, with doors that open into watery underworlds, avian military regimes and cultivated paradises. Overseeing it all is the reclusive grand uncle, sporting afulsome Nietzschean moustache, who apparently “read too many books and went insane”, and has taken refuge from the world of warfare in the orchidaceous greenhouses of his imagination. Mahito stalks the corridors, desperately searching for his dead mother. You’re invited to see the mad great uncle as a figure of Miyazaki himself, and the tower, maybe, as Ghibli, the animation powerhouse he founded, working countless backbreaking hours at the drawing board, all the while conscious of his neglect of his own family. In truth it’s hard to think of aliving artist who has paid more loving, careful attention to the world, from the rain falling upon a rural bus stop to the wind rippling agirl’s skirt, nor one who has wrestled so powerfully with the reality of warfare, work, environmental catastrophe and tyranny.