There is an undeniable quality, when watching a Hayao Miyazaki film, that you are witnessing the work of a Great Master. Even when it is a lesser work, it is the lesser work of a Great Master, and therefore better than anything their “peers” might be able to produce. All of Miyazaki’s films are tuned to 11 on the standard dial, even if on his personal dial a film - this film perhaps - comes in at a seven.
Imagine a wizard in a tall tower. This wizard has built this tall tower out of wonder, but wonder is fleeting, and must be rebuilt often, less the tower crumble and fade. But even a great wizard has only so much wonder in them, and can only reconfigure the pieces in so many ways before the wonder begins to leech. The wizard then needs a successor, but the obvious choice refuses this calling. And so, it is only a matter of time before the tower crumbles and the wizard is not but a memory. The unrelenting march of time in the face of making great art is clearly weighing on Miyazaki, enough that he abandoned his retirement and made his first (and potentially last) film in 10 years. The tower needed wonder, and he had a bit of magic left in him. It’s not the best configuration the tower has ever seen, but he’s still a wizard.
Before I go on, I want to clarify two things. Thing the first: I am a last comer to Miyazaki. His films were a blind spot for me until a recent global pandemic gave me the opportunity to sit down and absorb them. But because of that, I do not have a life time emotional attachment to each of his films. And they all do not speak to me in the way that I know most of them do to many. Thing the second: I do not think this is a bad movie. I think this is a master work by a master artist. With only one viewing under my belt though, my initial response to it is that it is a lesser master work, by an artist who is very aware that his time to produce master works is running out. I’ll also add that, because of scheduling, I was only able to see the American dub of the film, and want to see the original Japanese version to see if it sways me considerably.
Speaking of the Great Masters, I wonder how much of the last ten years Miyazaki has spent studying the great painters of old. I only ask, as I see their influence in this film at every turn. A bed chamber that feels like characters moving through a Vermeer, a horizon filled with ships that recalls Turner, licking fire that suggests Cezanne. Perhaps he was looking for inspiration, or perhaps he was attempting to place himself among them. It’s not stolen valor, Miyazaki deserves his place among the greats. But if I had to sum up my thoughts on The Boy and the Heron succinctly, it would be that it borrows the best of others, and because of that, it fails to ever feel like itself.
The heaviest borrowing this film does is from Miyazaki’s own filmography. Miyazaki does not strike me as someone who plays the hits because that’s what the audience expects, or checks boxes off a list of must-include elements. Instead, I think this was a honest side effect of the creative process, with Miyazaki reflecting on his career and the elements of past films that spoke strongly and truly to him, and they pulled themselves together here. The Boy and the Heron is what you get when you bring Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Castle in the Sky together and strip them for parts. Mahito (voiced in the American dub by Luca Padovan) has lost his mother in an accident during the second world war, and so his father (Christian Bale) takes him to the countryside where he meets his aunt Natsuko (Gemma Chan), soon to be his step-mother. Natsuko eventually goes missing, and Mahito seeks to find her in an long abandoned tower on the edge of his father’s property. As you might expect, the tower is a labyrinthian dream-world that Mahito must navigate, meeting its denizens, and he is guided in doing so by an ornery grey heron (in an unrecognizable and revelatory performance in the dub by Robert Pattinson).
Miyazaki himself has said he doesn’t entirely understand what happens in the film, and it does feel disjointed. Miyazaki has never held to a traditional story structure, and part of the charm of his films is that it is very hard to predict what will happen next. The Boy and the Heron feels more vignette-ish than his others though; not literally, but Mahito moves from one scene to another that have less cohesion between them than similarly disjointed films, like Totoro, or Kiki’s Delivery Service. Only the final act feels like it is “on to something”, as Mahito and his newest guardian Lady Himi (Karen Fukuhara) navigate a culture of ever hungry parakeets to reach the heart of the tower. The parakeets, voiced by Mamoudou Athie, Tony Revolori and Dan Stevens and led by Dave Bautista are the best part of the film, and I wish they were more of it (Miyazaki wants to say something with his use of birds in this film, but what he’s trying to say is beyond my ability to grok).
At 124 minutes, this is one of the longer of Miyazaki’s films, but its the only one that feels long. The first act overstays its welcome, and introduces too many things that don’t go anywhere. The first 45 minutes could be a brisk 15 or 20, introducing Mahito, his aunt, and the heron and sending them into the tower with haste. Spirited Away wasted no time getting Chihiro into the bath house, which in turn gave us more time to explore the world Miyazaki wanted to build within. The tower never feels like a place; it feels like disconnected stages that Mahito passes through. I also feel that Himi is introduced far too late, and that the building of their relationship to one another should be a strong emotional crux of the film. If the film was Mahito being passed from one guardian to another in his journey, from the heron, to Kiriko (a similar-to-Pattinson spectacular performance from Florence Pugh), to Himi, that would have worked too, if each guardian imparted something to Mahito that enabled him to grow and become stronger. But this film doesn’t have that kind of structure.
And I’ve just said all that, but I also remember after my first viewing of Totoro that it didn’t work for me because I kept expecting a structure and it never appeared. That’s not the fault of the movie, that’s on me. That’s a bias I bring to the experience, not letting the film just happen. And in some ways, The Boy and the Heron also just happens. Which makes me feel like this is a film that I will have to revisit multiple times over the course of years to appreciate. So let’s talk about what I could appreciate straight away. The American dub is pretty good, with most of the actors turning out great performances. As is often the case, a couple feel flat, but none are the main leads, so it’s something you can ignore. The score, as always from Joe Hisaishi, is the emotional throughout line of the film, though it is a more reserved score than we’ve gotten in the past. In the real world, it’s practically non-existent, save a few plunks at the piano. It’s only once we enter the tower that the music of the film come to life.
And, of course, it looks impeccable. Earlier this year, I waxed poetic about the revolution in animation that has been spurred by the Spider-verse films, and how transformative they will be on the medium. And here, in stark contrast but not in combat to that evolution, is a beautifully rendered, traditionally hand drawn film that looks timeless. This movie could have come out at any point in the last century, but also represents the pinnacle of the art form. How many other animators could make an outhouse haloed by a full moon look like it should be hanging in a museum? The movement of figures, the perfection of the still backgrounds, delicate magnitude in which the world is created is breathtaking, and I do worry sometime that animation of this type will become a lost art. The tactility of fish viscera, or wood chips, or tears is worth beholding. There is a scene that begins with Mahito suspended in space, which becomes water, which recedes and ends with him lying in bed, all in one single flowing, unbroken motion. It’s the sort of scene that live action films try to pull off all the time (and maybe only Shape of Water has come close to achieving), and frankly lesser animation studios might try and fail to execute effectively. But that is the skill of a Great Master, or the magic of a wizard.
Happily, Miyazaki is someone for whom sufficiently advanced skill is indistinguishable from magic.
The Boy and the Heron is in theatres now.
Give This A Watch
Wendell & Wild
Henry Selick is no Great Master, but he is one of the few advocates for stop-frame animation who can also actually get a movie funded. It is a condemnation of the industry that he has only five movies to his name, and that after Coraline had largely perhaps resigned himself to retirement. Like Miyazaki, after 13 years, he returned late last year with a collaboration between himself and Jordan Peele (also much like The Boy and the Heron, it premiered at TIFF). Wendell & Wild is an unusual film, and I fear one that risks being lost to the doldrums of the Netflix algorithm, perhaps only to breach the surface each Halloween if it’s lucky.
Wendell & Wild is also a film about grief, and much like Boy and the Heron, decides to take an atypical path to bringing their character resolution from it. Wendell & Wild feels very much like a reaction to the success of Laika Studios since Coraline, and Peele’s script (from at least 2015) definitely feels more like the product of a TV comedian with aspirations than the product of the much more confident filmmaker he has become since. None of this says it’s a bad film, it just likely isn’t the film you’d expect going into it. The animation is top shelf, and since Will Vinton’s death, Selick is one of the few advocates for the medium of stop motion left (though Guillermo del Toro seems to have decided to set up shop in this area now, to my personal delight). It’s worth a watch, and not just at Halloween.