The Boy and the Heron

Part of my coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival.

THE BOY AND THE HERON   ***

Hayao Miyazaki

2023

IDEA:  Having lost his mother in a firebombing in Tokyo during World War II, Mahito moves to the countryside with his father and stepmother, where he stumbles upon a fantastical parallel reality.

BLURB:  In Miyazaki’s fables of childhood, as in so many stories about youth, the protagonist ventures into a magical alternate reality that allows them to process the tumultuous events in their life. So it is in The Boy and the Heron, a bildungsroman in the vein of Spirited Away that finds a boy confronting his wartime trauma, filial angst, and self-limitations in a fantasy underworld populated by voracious, mutated birdlife and the alter-egos of both the dead and living. Miyazaki realizes this oneiric realm with some of the most astonishingly vivid and nuanced animation of his career, reveling in precise modulations of color, texture, and movement within a landscape that defies the laws of physics in unexpected and often hilarious ways. Whether it’s something as mundane as the way a drop of water rolls down Mahito’s chin as he takes a drink of water from a mug, or as spectacularly weird as an army of steroidal parakeets bustling in a dining hall, or as primally frightening as a city engulfed in flames, the animation has a supple expressiveness that is ravishing to behold. It’s somewhat frustrating, then, that the world it articulates feels rather haphazard, muddy in its rules and parameters and oddly underdeveloped considering Miyazaki’s prodigious imagination. How does society operate here? If it’s a land of unborn souls as well as a haven for endangered animals, why are there younger versions of people who have already lived, and why are there so few kinds of animals? The fuzzy nature of this reality blunts the emotional through-line of The Boy and the Heron, which lacks the storytelling elegance and thematic focus of Spirited Away. Still, it’s a gorgeous-looking and -sounding journey, and another feather in the cap of a master artist who hardly needs to prove his genius.