The Boy and the Heron is Bewildering and Excellent

Hayao Miyazaki's new (and final?) film is personal, profound, and powerful, challenging viewers with how to live

The Japanese title of legendary director Hayao Miyazaki’s magical, tremendous new animated film, The Boy and the Heron, translates literally as “How do you live?”, a reference to a 1937 Japanese novel of the same name. In the film, protagonist Mahito Maki is left the novel by his mother, who dies tragically in a hospital fire during the Pacific War in 1943. Though not a literary adaptation, Miyazaki uses the novel as a jumping-off point – both feature adolescents contending with what it means to live as they come of age.

After Mahito’s mother’s death, his father marries her sister and moves everyone to her family’s countryside estate. Mahito, consumed by grief, is badgered by a mysterious grey heron who claims his mother is still alive. Eventually, Mahito is accompanied by the heron on a journey into an alternate, fantastical reality with talking, ghostly creatures and foreign, seemingly ever-changing landscapes as he encounters various characters with ties to both this mystical land and his ancestors.

This may seem a conventional premise, yet The Boy and the Heron is anything but. Miyazaki pulls from his upbringing to tell this story, as he too was dislocated from his home because of World War II bombings and experienced a close relationship with his mother fraught by her illness. Known for his lush imagery and expressive storytelling centering children’s growth, Miyazaki ostensibly unretired to write and direct this film; after formally announcing his retirement with 2013’s The Wind Rises, a similarly personal story about a stand-in for his father, Miyazaki may remain unretired, purportedly working on another feature.

Retired or not, The Boy and the Heron is a film meditating on life, loss, and what we leave the world and its people. Mahito’s experiences force him to confront living a life on behalf of others in truly overwhelming fashion. Studio Ghibli’s animation is breathtaking and all-encompassing. I often found myself unsure what precisely was happening and who was whom for the vast majority of the film’s runtime as it juggled myriad threads and ideas only to be completely floored and overcome by its conclusion that beautifully unites every element.

One of the most active, alive, and, eventually, affirming movies of the year, The Boy and the Heron, while not easy or simplistic, is purely a triumph, as it not only forces Mahito but the audience to answer the question of how do they live.