Miyazaki’s world of the dead has more life than our living world. With breathtaking animation and moving score, the film as a whole is a worthy addition to the legendary filmmaker. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection you can see the pieces holding it up don’t quite fit together.
The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki’s most recent “last film”, opened the 48th Toronto International Film Festival. Tickets to all public screenings were sold out within less than two hours, so you can tell the expectations were high. But, just as the world of the dead architect has constructed it from mis-shapen parts, the film has a similar structure. While as a whole it seems to be fine, upon closer inspection you can see that some pieces don’t quite fit.
The Boy and the Heron, follows the boy Mahito Maki in WWII ridden Japan after the unfortunate death of his mother by bombing, and his new life in rural Japan with his new step-mother, who looks eerily identical to his late mother. At the lake near their house, a gray heron taunts him, and the two of them will eventually wind up going on an adventure together in the world of the dead.
Miyazaki’s world of the dead has more life to it than our living world. The use of the animated natural forces – whether it’s fire, water, or animals – feels consuming and larger than life. Miyazaki’s distinct style of animation produces a kind of softness that is unlike any other animated film, enabling the exploration of harsh or rough coming-of-age subjects. However, here it wasn’t used to its full potential, and I left the theater not fully comprehending what Miyakazi was trying to tell me or what Mahito had learned .
The Boy’s journey wasn’t very clear, which is a major issue when it’s a coming-of-age journey type of film. At first, he was looking for his missing step-mother by reaching the center of the abandoned lake tower, but meandering along the way to showcase corners of beauty in this fantastic world, caused loss of urgency both for the character and the viewers. Not to mention, it takes around 30 or so minutes to reach the fantastic world of the story, where everything occurs, and it doesn’t feel justifiable either.
The Gray Heron was impressively disgusting and worked well as the “antagonist”, while at times being extremely untrustworthy and provocative, but ending up being the boy’s greatest ally and helped him through the most critical parts of the film. Unfortunately, he was the only character who felt true, while other characters felt more like tools in the story – a lot of them being used for exposition, explanations, or solving problems – and then just disappearing until they have to report for duty again.
The use of “dream logic” in Miyazaki’s film is nothing new, and though it is hard to justify, it usually works intuitively for the viewers, like in Spirited Away. But in this case, the laws sometimes felt they existed just to force artificial drama and hardships more than being inherent to the world itself. It doesn’t really make sense for unborn spirits to be fed regular human food, but then again, they would need their strength to return to the world of living – so we just accept that. We also accept that pelicans and parakeets would try and eat them, since they would want that strength, too. Those in-world rules work just fine. But rules about who can or cannot enter a specific place, when and why some doors open or close – seem to be an artificial way to add unnecessary conflict, which causes this dream-world to be less cohesive.
Miyazaki’s fantastical world, like our dreams, cannot exist without the real world, there is a love/hate relationship to it. I think the best metaphor for Miyazaki’s relationship to the real world is when one of its characters is surrounded by hundreds of colorful parakeets but is also getting covered by their poop – they choose to focus on the birds, saying how cute they all are. While I can try to choose to focus on the positive aspects, the film both works somehow, and yet I cannot ignore it coming up short.
The review was written by Itamar David Leshman, in collaboration with Illy Levi.
