Where to Look: March 2024
The Boy and the Heron, original poetry, links from around the web, and a Lenten film series
A full March issue of The Kingfisher Chronicle is on the way, but in the meantime I thought it’d be fun to share with you an essay on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. In light of the award it won at the Oscars earlier this week, it seems only appropriate.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, tread with caution, as spoilers abound. If you have seen it, I’d be delighted to read your own thoughts in the comments.
As a “Where to Look” piece, I will also have a few other recommendations for you following the essay.
“A child can be told everything—everything. I was always struck by the thought of how poorly grown-ups know children, even fathers and mothers of their own children. Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they’re little and it’s too early for them to know. What a sad and unfortunate idea! And how well children themselves can see that their fathers consider them too little and unable to understand anything, while they understand everything.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli, 2023) is by and far, the auteur animator’s most difficult work to date—which is saying a lot. To suspend disbelief in his previous film’s has been trying, undoubtedly, but to do so here feels almost like an ascetic task. This is hardly without reason, of course. Put simply, it just operates on an imaginative stratum far above his other work. Even so, it also pulls some of the greatest emotional punches in his oeuvre thus far.
Let’s back up though. The film opens with a rather credible stake in the historic—or, if you’re Miyazaki himself, the semi-autobiographical. 11-year-old Mahito is awakened to the blare of sirens in Tokyo, presumably circa World War II. Amidst the clamor, Mahito’s father informs him that the hospital in which Mahito’s mother is on fire. The boy rushes through the street, pushing his way through swarming crowds, only to arrive at the hospital as it bursts into a final, fateful blaze, his mother still inside.
In time, Mahito’s father remarries. The adjustment is far from easy on Mahito. As he continues to suffer the loss of his mother, he also has to come to terms with his new mother, Natsuko, who is, incidentally, the sister of his late mother and who appears in her spitting image. Distressed, angry, and confused, Mahito gets in fights at school, and, in an attempt to get revenge on his assailants, frames them by bludgeoning his head with a stone. The self-inflicted wound leaves him bedridden, bandaged and scarred for some amount of time.
Adding to all of this confusion and angst is the pesky gray heron on Natsuko’s property. At first, the bird only swoops past him, but in time it reveals itself to be a real nuisance. (Here is where the first exercises in disbelief commence.) This heron, you see, insists rather brashly to Mahito that his mother is still alive, that she is hidden deep in the mysterious tower overlooking Natsuko’s country estate, and that Mahito’s “presence is requested” therein. One day, Natsuko herself goes missing in its halls. When no one else is willing to traverse the strange tower, Mahito ventures into it, searching now for both of his mothers, with the heron as his guide.
With this plot exposition out the way, what follows is a rather dense fantastical world through which Mahito journeys. It’s too rich in detail to describe with any sort of brevity here, so I won’t attempt to summarize it. What I will say, though, is that it is some of the finest evidence we have that Hayao Miyazaki, perhaps more than any other living storyteller, understands the capacity children have for abstract, symbolic, and even spiritual thought.
I ought to note once more before I trudge down this analytic line the semi-autobiographical nature of this film, a point that promotional press for it has emphasized quite heavily. Similar to the film’s protagonist, Miyazaki witnessed the horror of the Pacific War firsthand when he and his family fled Hiroshima just before its bombing. Other commentators have speculated on the degree to which the film is a reflection on what will become of Studio Ghibli, which was founded for almost the sole purpose of producing Miyazaki’s animation, after Miyazaki himself passes from this world. Themes of friendship throughout hearken to his decades long relationships with Ghibli co-founders Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, the former of whom passed away in 2018.
These details are all interesting in their own right, but they by themselves can’t quite account for the whole of the movie’s content. At the end of the day, The Boy and the Heron is essentially a fairy tale, one that verges on myth. By fairy tale, I do not mean to belittle the film in any way, nor do I mean to suggest that its primary ends are didactic or moralistic. What I do mean is that it operates mostly within a world of symbol. Fairy tales as I understand them (owing in large part to the work of Marie-Louise von Franz on this subject) are not even primarily for children, strictly speaking, but represent a mode of deeply meditative storytelling, drawing on images and tropes stored within the collective unconscious to convey a truth about the spiritual and psychological realities common to human experience. They are, in this way, a sort of evolutionary predecessor to myths, which localize the drama of fairy tales to a specific time and place (as opposed to the figurative “Once upon a time in a land far, far away”). That The Boy and the Heron is very explicitly set in Japan at around the time of Pacific War would lend itself, then, more towards the latter mode of story than the former. But its heavy reliance on archetypes and symbols is far more characteristic of fairy tales. To that end, it sits somewhere between the two categories, sharing elements of both.
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