LIVE SLUG REACTION - THE BOY AND THE HERON

This write up is full of spoilers, so please read at your own risk. 

Immediately after watching this film I thought, "that was cute."
A few days later, my delayed processing caught up with me and I thought, "I fuckin loved that."

The first thing I noticed about The Boy and The Heron was how quiet it was. I know my man Miyazaki loves his Joe Hisaishi sweeping orchestral music, so it was noticeable to me how much of the movie forwent any music at all, not even the twinkling piano that this duo is so fond of using to underscore soft moments. On top of that, the people themselves are often pretty quiet. This is a protagonist who notably does not ever voice his ambient thoughts or feelings or actions as he moves through the story. I adore Spirited Away and Howl, and one of the hallmarks of those films to me is how often Chihiro and Sophie speak aloud what they're doing or how they're feeling. It felt significant that Mahito never really does this. He is a quiet boy, very clearly left to his own devices after the mother he adored passed away.

When the movies choose to let its characters talk, it oscillates between very pointed and very abstract dialogue. I don't think it cares much if I kept up or got all the details. It reminds me of The Cat Returns in some of its more nonsensical moments, (which in turn itself reminds me of Fantasia a bit) but the Boy and the Heron delves into the chaos with a more serious and contemplative atmosphere, as a reflection of our very serious, young protagonist.

I haven't checked in with Miyazaki in a minute. I never saw Wind Rises. I read somewhere that he and his son patched things up since their infamous blowout over Wizard of Earthsea. I honestly hope everyone is doing well. I like to believe that Miyazaki made this film strictly because he wanted to, and that's why the movie doesn't particularly give a shit if I understood what it was saying. And for that, I am really grateful for it. I'm sick of that perilous feeling that so many stories are suffused with where the creators have a deathgrip on their own ideas. So many shows and movies and books give me the impression that the author behind it needs me to understand exactly what their personal point of view is. It needs to be obvious that they said the right things, and got away with the clever twist, felt bad for the right people, and demonized the others with perfectly legal capital punishments.

Mahito very clearly doesn't have the luxury of someone with good strong morals educating him on what is right and what is wrong. His father is busy overseeing the construction of warplanes and ignoring his family. Mahito lost one mother to sickness which left her hospital bound and helpless when said hospital caught fire. A few years later, Mahito is staunchly refusing his father's new wife—his own aunt—by strictly referring to her as his father's significant other. The narrative isn't concerned with the specifics on the timeline of how his aunt became his father's new bride. Why should it elucidate this when our hero is actively turning his cheek from it? He wants his real mother, and only his real mother, and she's gone.

After Mahito and his father move to his aunt’s family home out in the country, we see Mahito getting bullied at school in another unspoken sequence. It took me a while to realize that Mahito is basically the rich military family boy who shows up in the rural school and gets picked on by the local poor kids. After his little boy fist fight, alone in the countryside that he did not grow up in, Mahito picks up a rock and slams it against his own head, worsening his injuries. We are given no explanation for this. All we see is an angry, silent, isolated child making a decision to make it all worse. He won't tell us why, just as he refuses to tell his vengeance-obsessed father who was responsible. Perhaps Mahito recognizes that he is an invasive species in these other kids’ lives, and that no one wants him there, not even he wants to be here. There is no point in getting those kids in trouble. Maybe Mahito did that to himself with the express hope that his father would pull him out of school so he wouldn’t have to continue being around the kids who hate him. Maybe he just wanted his dad to pay attention to him.

I don't need to know why the boy hit himself with a rock. What matters is the feeling the action conveys. He is very likely numbed by grief and the continued ignorance of his father. Or maybe he's just a spoiled brat who wants attention. It's really up to you how the narrative sits on your shoulders. 

It is clear to me that Mahito's father sucks, but again, the story doesn't go out of its way to luxuriate in this. It is presented as fact in the same way that the setting is. We’re not given commentary, but are left to make our own conclusions based on the few bits of concrete information we get. The first thing we see of him is the incredibly fast cut from Mahito's mother passing away to a faceless shot of Mahito's aunt putting his father's hand on her belly, announcing a new child. I imagine that's what it felt like to Mahito, like no time at all passed before his father married someone who isn’t as good as his mother. 

It's a reasonable match, to marry the sister of your deceased wife, and if I’m not mistaken, this used to be way more common. You know the family already, they look similar, and the new person has a connection to your existing child. For a man who's primary concern is the running of his military fighter plane business, it makes perfect sense. For a child who's favorite person is seemingly getting replaced by her less exciting sister, it probably feels like further ignorance from the man who is supposed to be responsible for them all. Did his father even love his mother if he is so quick to replace gold with silver? What does it say about his relationship with his son, and subsequent new child? 

The movie isn't going to answer those questions. That's for us to think about it.

(Another thing that’s never explicitly stated is that Mahito’s dad is responsible for the construction of these fighter planes. The only indication we get is the man presiding over a room full of the glass shells that cover the cockpits of planes. I made the connection between the bloodthirsty birds populating the magical other world and the fighter planes. To some little kids, military planes are like massive cool toys. To other kids, a plane loaded with weapons is really no different from a massive bird stalking you with a knife to cook you for dinner.)

Mahito's aunt, Natsuko, is getting sicker as her pregnancy gets further along, which must be a terrifying echo to Mahito who's first mother died in a hospital. Natsuko keeps asking for Mahito, and everyone tells him that he should make time for her, but what is time to a boy who just had his real mother taken from him much too soon? Instead, Mahito concerns himself with the fucking horrifying heron that's haunting his new home.

I loved the animation flexing with the subtle reveal of the heron and the man coexisting in a body. The heron himself is a great character, a not-so-wise man there to push Mahito toward the mystery of his ancestor's weird secret tower in the woods. The heron tries to lure Mahito into the tower with the promise of seeing his dead mother again—a trick Mahito calls out immediately, as death is far too real for him. Only after Mahito watches his sickly pregnant aunt disappear into the woods does he finally commit to seeing the tower, but whenever he's asked about it, he insists he's only there to see his mother, or to get his father's wife back. He denies any affection for his aunt for a big chunk of the film, despite undertaking this journey in part to save her life.

(It’s all the more sad because Mahito isn’t aware of the moment where Natsuko takes up a beautiful bow and fires an arrow from a great distance to scare off the trickster heron. It’s how we, the viewers, see her caring for him without any expectation of her affection getting returned, and our first indication that she knows much more than she’s saying. But this action isn’t what endears Mahito to her. He finds that emotion naturally on his own.)

After Mahito suits up with his own homemade bow and arrow to go save his aunt, and maybe see if his mother really IS in that tower, we are shown Mahito’s father making the pragmatic and monstrous decision to stop searching for his brand new pregnant bride and son in order to continue his much needed business so his precious fighter planes can continue getting built unimpeded. Here is a man who quite literally makes blood money who does not even realize in that moment that Mahito is taking on the task of saving his family. All for the war machine, baby.

As Mahito enters the tower, we are slowly shown that there are two worlds housed within each other, the one Mahito was born in that the audience recognizes, and the nonsensical, magical one that his great uncle runs with a set of what looks like children's building blocks. Here we are served up gorgeous settings that spill over into each other like pools of different colored paint. This world is made of magic, built upon a precious stack of mismatched blocks that were never designed to fit together naturally. It is a disjointed, messy, dangerous and beautiful world contained within an impossible rock that fell from space. 

Through Mahito’s search for his family, we are taken through these contemplative quiet sequences, again with noticeably little dialogue for a lot of it. We are shown a gorgeous field full of hungry, desperate pelicans. We are taken across a vast ocean full of massive fish. We are shown a stunning sequence of life and death between the adorable warawara creatures and the invasive pelican species that reveals the interconnected nature of this fantasy world and the real world. It is in that sequence that we meet Himi, a young woman who can control fire. 

In an attempt to save the helpless warawara on their journey to bring life to Mahito’s world, Himi uses great blasts of fire to chase off the hungry birds, and in so doing, winds up accidentally killing some of the warawara herself. This happens while Mahito watches helplessly from the sides, nothing but a spectator. When Mahito finds a scorched and dying pelican in the aftermath, the bird explains that all of them were brought into the world by mistake, and must eat these creatures to survive. Does a wild animal not deserve food? Again, the movie will not answer this question. Why should it? We, too, are spectators on the sides, unable to influence anything in this movie, anything in the art that we look at.

This movie understands the worth of asking an unanswerable question. It is filled with them. 

Himi herself is an unanswerable question. As it turns out, she is younger version of Mahito’s mother, existing in this impossible world with Mahito’s great uncle who disappeared from the “real” world years ago. The first thing we see of her is this terrible moment of her using fire and killing a few innocent souls in order to save many more. This is the woman whom Mahito adores. His mother who married a rich man of wealth built on war planes that kill people. Later, when Himi realizes that she is meant to be Mahito’s mother in his world, Mahito warns her that she’s just going to die in a fire if she goes to fulfill that role. In response, she him that fire never scared her, and she really wants to be his mother.  

Does she mean the fire that killed her? Does she mean the fire of war? Does she mean the fire of Mahito’s father? Himi is a fascinating and complex equation that mostly goes uncommented on because we are focused on the point of view of a child who could never in a million years answer the question “are my parents good or bad people?” A silent and angry child who does not understand his place in the world, who wants love from two people who can’t give it, and cannot trust when it’s given to him by anyone else. 

In this fantasy world full of invasive, bloodthirsty birds and humans who seem to straddle multiple worlds, Mahito is shown life and death in numerous angles. He watches a woman kill a gigantic fish, and is shown how to gut that fish so they can feed it to the warawara who appear to need the organs of dead things in order to become the souls of living things. We see humanoid versions of the invasive birds trying to kill and eat Mahito at various times. And all of this is underscored by the impending birth of a new sibling for Mahito while Natsuko is sequestered in a dark, intimidating birthing room. 

Over the course of the film, we are drip fed these enigmatic shots of Mahito’s great uncle, a very old scholar who found this strange magic tower in the woods, and disappeared inside of it to search for knowledge. We see him with the building blocks stacking them in precarious fashion because, as we learn, every single day this man must restack the blocks in a new configuration and pray that they don’t collapse, lest this world collapse with it. This old man has seen something in Mahito, the makings of a successor, and so he plans to give this magic world and all its responsibilities to his very young nephew. 

Mahito himself is utterly unaware of this plan. He is busy trying to rescue his aunt and squeezing in time with the girl who is, or will become his mother. After transgressing in this weird kingdom, Mahito draws the attention of the bird king. These invasive birds are so numerous, they have built an entire society within the tower, complete with a king who fights for his people. There are more birds than humans in this world that they are not native to. We never see them shown in any particularly positive light, but the implications go beyond the scope of the film. It is the great uncle who brought these birds into the tower with him, and so it is this man the birds answer to even after they have greatly outnumbered him and his family. 

It is a fraught world full of death and life and violence and magic. Mahito moves through it as a boy in search of his family. The birds move through it in search of food. The warawara move through it as helpless creatures. Himi cuts through this world with a seemingly uncontrollable kind of power that hurts in the same breath as it helps.

When the bird king goes to the human ruler of this place and asks for Mahito’s punishment, he is told the Mahito is to inherit this place. The bird king is obviously unsatisfied with this answer, and schemes to take matters into his own hands. At the same time as this little revenge scheme is set into motion, we see Mahito’s human father in the other world plotting to go after whoever kidnapped his wife and child with his sword in his belt.

One of my favorite moments in this movie is when the great uncle is explaining to Mahito that he has been chosen to take over the land, and that all he must do is stack these blocks with care once a day, or the whole place will go with it. Mahito simply says no. He has no desire to rule, or to play with these blocks. In the course of this film, he has realized the role that Natsuko plays in his life, that while his father was busy ignoring him, Natsuko showed care and concern without asking for anything back. He has realized that he does have a mother, and that connection is far more important to him than ruling over some magical land that he did not grow up with—a position he has not earned. 

The bird king overhears this conversation, and rushes in to say, that’s it? All you need to do to rule this place is to stack these simple little blocks? The ruler of invasive birds with a sword in his belt immediately stacks the blocks with his chest puffed up, and just as quickly begins to sweat as the tower wobbles, and then collapses. The world itself then begins to collapse as Mahito’s father, with sword in his belt, prepares to charge the tower in the woods from the outside world where he believes his wife and child have been kidnapped. 

The block metaphor hit me so right. This man spends the bulk of his life building these shaky little towers in silence to support this beautiful and terrible world. Sometimes art is messy and you feel like you're just barely balancing shit together to make it function while invasive blood thirsty parrots that you yourself accidentally introduced are trying to ruin everything from the inside. Sometimes you spend so much time looking at a piece, all you can see are the building blocks, and not the sprawling and lush ecosystem that took root. Sometimes you are meant to lose yourself in the details, and sometimes you are meant to climb to the top of the tower and behold it all as one. There is no one correct way to view art, but the answer is almost never to rush in and decide for yourself how the tower is to be built in three seconds flat.

The viewer does not get to decide the pace at which art is made or revealed.

Of course, that’s a personal read on the theme. A more literal read would be to examine the men of this film who take what isn’t theirs and decide how it is run, who it really belongs to, and what is to be done with it. Mahito is a child of a war profiteer, and the great nephew of a man who wandered into a tower that quite literally fell from space and became its ruler. Both of these men stand on top of empires, one of blood money and one of magic. They both impose their will on Mahito in different ways. You are my heir, they both promise, of worlds on the brink of collapse. We see Mahito say no quite clearly to the man who runs the tower. We don’t see him say no to his father, but we do see him accept Natsuko—accepting love. He refuses a kingdom that never really belonged to his family in the first place. We cannot be guaranteed that Mahito won’t screw up at some point with his father, but we can hope that he’ll be able to connect the dots the way that we, as an audience, are being left to connect the dots.

A theme that constantly appears in Miyazaki’s films is that of children grappling with concepts much bigger than them. Here, I think the metaphor is extended to the viewer, but it’s important to acknowledge the obvious. Children do not get to choose when they learn about death and life and birth and grief and hospital rooms that catch fire. When their parents are absent, the world becomes their teacher, and everyone knows that you cannot impose your own needs on the world. It will spin at its own pace no matter what you want from it. It is a kindness that there are adults in Mahito’s life who choose to help him and offer him lessons. We see it in the heron and we see it in Kiriko. But it is not what’s supposed to happen. A parent should be willing to have these difficult conversations, rather than burying themselves in work. We can cheer for a young child navigating strange fantastical worlds like Mahito here, or Chihiro in Spirited Away, but it is sad that a child should be there at all. Yes, Mahito gets to return to the real world with a woman who loves him and the promise of a sibling he can bond with, but he’s also returning to the father who probably should never have been a father at all. Just as we watched Mahito’s mother choosing to sacrifice a few for the sake of many, this story is bittersweet to the last. We cannot save a dead parent. We cannot punish every neglectful parent. We can only hope that the world will be kinder to the people getting swept along in its current.

And just as Mahito does not get to choose the pace at which he learns how the world works, we do not control the pace of this movie. We are at Mahito’s level, dragged along with him through what may feel like a chaotic world at first. In my experience, you only need to spend some time with it before you can see how everything connects, the building blocks that hold it all together, but perhaps I’m just exhausted by stories that grab me by the hand and force feed every clean message and moral from the author. When it comes to stories that take place in fantastic worlds, I prefer to be at the character’s level, not the author’s. If that means taking on the perspective of a lost and angry and numb little boy, I’m fine with that. 

Funny how a story from the POV of a child is so much more dense and meaty and subtle to me than so many stories about adults that seem to treat its viewers like children for the blunt force at which they deliver their black and white messages. 

Almost everything in this film is taken from Miyazaki’s very familiar toy box. We’ve seen him do most of this before in different worlds, different stories. The warawara and the soot sprites and the kodama and even the various totoros all share DNA. The chaos of this magical tower isn’t really all that different from the wacky shit going on in The Cat Returns, or the dark magic in Howl’s Moving Castle. Everyone knows at this point that Miyazaki is vehemently anti-war, it’s in nearly every one of his films. Sick mothers and estranged siblings and time bending shenanigans are woven throughout his entire body of work. I wasn’t upset about it the 2nd or 3rd or 4th or 5th time. Why would I suddenly be tired of it now? An artist’s favorite ingredient list is part of what makes them interesting. The ability to cook several different dishes from the same pantry and make them all taste subtly different is a skill. Not everyone can do it. Most people struggle to make one dish good enough to eat, let alone a dozen.

Miyazaki is 82 years old. He went quiet for 10 years and came out of retirement to make this movie. I do not think this is his best work, but I do think it is a personal work, and for that it is special to me. I’ve never been as old as I currently am. That sounds stupid to point out, but it’s good to remember sometimes. We are all as old as we’ve ever been. This man is 50 years my senior, and he decided he had paint left on the palette. What he made spoke to me. I was a literal child when I saw my first Miyazaki film—Spirited Away shown in a movie theater. It was truly a life altering experience to be so young, as young as the protagonist, and see a story that was so very alive and quite literally SPIRITED, and markedly different from the western movies I was used to. It always struck me as profoundly sad that Chihiro’s supposedly happy ending was returning to her, let’s face it, pig-headed parents. Now I am the age of these children’s parents, feeling like I am still learning everyday what the fuck it is to be an adult. I’m watching these children and I’m watching these flawed and strange adults and I am able to see a bit of myself in every one of them. 

Watching The Boy and The Heron was also a reminder that sometimes it’s good to only know a creator through their work. I have no desire to pick apart Miyazaki as a man when his work speaks so loudly to me. And so I hold this movie in a line of his other movies and I ask what it is that feels different, unique, familiar, unsurprising, comfortable, or uncomfortable. My brother asked me at one point if the lines of the animation felt different from the usual and I had to think on it. I’m not an animator. I said, no, nothing about that felt different except perhaps more modern tools at work. What feels different to me here is that this film cares about silence—silence imposed and silence chosen. The silence of a person who passed away, the silence of a person who should be your guide who would rather dote on his business. And, of course, the selfishness of suffering in silence when you’re ignoring someone who loves you unconditionally.

I don’t want to propose my read on this film as the only correct way to look at it. I only wanted to allow myself to dig my fingers in there and shake up all the pieces that excite me. I didn’t even write down every detail I loved—I laughed aloud at several points, I love that stupid heron. But I have to stop writing eventually. You’re welcome to hate or love or tolerate this movie on your own terms. I think it deserves its spot amongst the other wonderful things Miyazaki made, but maybe I’m being too generous with an artist whose work I love. I don’t really care one way or another if I’m being honest.   

Also I am obsessed with this write up on Variety. “If his retirement is to be believed” fucking get his octagenarian ass.