Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
My original plan was to watch The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka if you want the original Japanese) on Sunday and post the review that night. Alas, I fell asleep about 45 minutes in. My follow-up plan, then, was to skip back a few minutes to the last thing I remembered and watch after my lectures on Monday night. And the same thing happened. I fell asleep again, managing to get to about the 1 hour 15 mark before I had no idea what was happening. I’d try desperately hard to focus, and five minutes later, my eyes would be rolling back into my head.
What does this mean? It means that evidently, despite how much I really wanted to like it, I found The Boy and the Heron to be the movie equivalent of Sominex. I like Miyazaki’s films as a rule, so this came not only as a surprise but as a supreme disappointment.
What’s the problem here? Bluntly, there’s far too much going on. We’re going to begin in Tokyo during World War II. Our protagonist Mahito (Luca Padovan—I watched the dubbed version) awakens to the news that the hospital where his mother works is on fire. Mahito’s mother dies in the fire. Soon enough, Mahito’s father Shoichi (Christian Bale) has married his late wife’s sister Natsuko (Gemma Chan) and gotten her pregnant. Shoichi and Mahito move out to the country where Mahito encounters a grey heron that leads him to a sealed tower, which is the last known location of Natsuko’s granduncle (eventually voiced by Mark Hamill).
Eventually, the heron (Robert Pattinson) starts, equipped with very human-like teeth, starts speaking to Mahito, telling him that he can take him to his mother. Mahito is nearly captured, but is saved by Natsuko with an arrow, which causes Mahito to create his own bow and arrow, which he fletches with feathers from the heron. Eventually, an ill Natsuko wanders off into the forest. Mahito follows her, along with Kiriko (Florence Pugh), one of the elderly maids at the house where they are all living now. Eventually, Mahito injures the heron, who is revealed to have a man living inside him.
This is not anywhere near as strange as things get. Mahito, Kiriko, and the Birdman sink into the floor and end up in an oceanic world where Kiriko has become a young fisherwoman, and pelicans attack everything around them. Spirits in this land, called the Warawara, eat fish and eventually rise up to the world above to be born as humans, at least until the pelicans attack—and this is prevented by the arrival of Himi (Karen Fukuhara), who has pyrokinetic powers.
And honestly, this still isn’t all. There are carnivorous giant parakeets in this world as well, and a wizard, who is actually Natsuko’s granduncle, who balances a series of blocks every day to keep the world spinning. At some point, The Boy and the Heron is filled with too many things, too many ideas to process, too much happening to keep straight. I simply got to the point where I was overwhelmed with something new popping up every few minutes.
Miyazaki retired after he made The Wind Rises in 2013, and aside from a short film he made half a dozen years ago, he hasn’t made anything else. The Boy and the Heron feels very much like it contains the concepts for three or four films. Had Miyazaki continued making films after The Wind Rises, it feels like a lot of the different aspects of The Boy and the Heron would have been the centerpieces of those three or four films. It’s overflowing with ideas and places and things and people and creature and concepts, and it never stops.
I am absolutely in the minority on this for feeling like The Boy and the Heron contains enough for three movies and feels like too much for one. I suppose that ultimately I liked this in the sense that, like everything from Studio Ghibli, it’s gorgeous to look at. The animation is lovely, as expected. It’s rich and beautiful, and I would expect nothing less.
I just wish that the story was one that I found interesting.
Why to watch The Boy and the Heron: Like all Miyazaki films, it’s gorgeous.
Why not to watch: It’s a soporific.
I still want to see it out of respect for Miyazaki based on the few films of his that I've seen as he is still a master.
ReplyDeleteI watched it in the cinema with my family, my son is a huge Ghibli fan. Maybe the cinematic experience made it easier to follow. I agree there is a lot going on and I did not get half of it, but there, in the cinema, it did work . Maybe a simpler approach would have worked better, but there is also something exhilarating about the wild imagination of Miyazaki.
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree. It was just too damn much to follow.
DeleteYeah, I had a lot of hype for this movie and it definitely fell in the middle of the pack of Ghibli films for me. Beautiful to watch, but I haven't had the urge to revisit it.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I feel really reassured by this. I was convinced that I was missing something, because the hype for it is huge.
DeleteI read an article somewhere (either Variety or Hollywood Reporter, but I don't fully remember) when this came out in theaters that did a good job in laying out the film in terms of its metaphors and who was supposed to represent what. Basically, below the various levels of fantasy storylines that take place & are touched upon in the film, the film is kind of a hodgepodge of metaphorical autobiographical elements of Miyazaki's life, wrapped together somewhat into a fantasy storyline that serves as Miyazaki's exploration of his life, all that it's led to, and what it ultimately will mean after he is gone. Of the bits I remember from the article, Mahito is Miyazaki himself (Miyazaki's own mother had similar health problems that kept her hospitalized & also died when Miyazaki was young), the Heron is Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki's partner & co-founder of Studio Ghibli, and the elder granduncle who shapes fantasy worlds with building blocks is his fellow Ghibli director & some-time mentor figure in animation, Isao Takahata (who died in 2018). There's plenty of other bits that Miyazaki draws from elements of his life that he uses in the film, but I don't remember what they all were or what other things in the film were there to represent (I think the hospital fire that kills Mahito's mother was based on a real fire Miyazaki witnessed when he was young, & the whole story bit of Mahito rejecting the granduncle's way of doing things mirrored Miyazaki's own wishes to do his own thing with his animation & storytelling when he was starting out, for instance).
ReplyDeleteThe problem Miyazaki runs into, by trying to include all these real-life-based elements, is weaving them all together into a single, coherent story that makes sense, comes across cleanly, and is self-contained in the narrative of the film itself. While a lot of the fantasy story in the film works by itself, there's also a lot that doesn't seem to fit into that same puzzle the film is building, or is far less explained or relevant to what the main narrative thread is trying to build to; my suspicion is it's these elements that are drawn from Miyazaki's life & experiences that he felt compelled to have in this semi-autobiographical narrative, but that are far less discernable to a regular audience or make less sense with the surface-level plot the film is moving through at the same time. All these differing pieces, elements, and themes, from both fantasy storytelling and Miyazaki's life, can't all piece together & add up to a single, unified, coherent fictional narrative; even though Miyazaki does do his very best in trying to do just that, it's just an ultimately impossible task. It's the same issue I had with Jordan Peele's Us: the screenwriter can't manage to successfully marry all the various metaphorical elements of the film with the fictional narrative they're also building to carry the film through, though them trying their best in doing that is basically the reason behind the film in the first place.
The article did a lot to clear up some of the fogginess in my understanding I had after I saw this in theaters; it also, though, made the flaws in the construction of the film's narrative that much more discernable. It's still a beautiful film, and I don't think anyone could fault the film for the levels it goes to with the animation; the actual story, however, isn't as easily praiseworthy, and it's because of how much of the film isn't very understandable without outside knowledge or sources from things like the article I read. If I have to go to a third-party source to understand the film's content instead of it being contained & discernable within the film itself, then the film's narrative has failed in one of the core requirements it should be meeting.
Honestly, I don't find a lot of this surprising. I think it's clear that there isn't anything here just to be here, or to clog up the narrative or to give the audience one more thing to keep track of. But there are a hell of a lot of moving parts in this thing. It would be one thing if this were a miniseries, or something that unfolded over multiple movies. It's a lot to force into a 2-hour bag, though.
DeleteI'm reminded of something the old leader of the 1001 Movies club said about Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. Essentially, his point was that if I have to read something to tell me what the movie meant, I'm going to respond by asking why that wasn't in the movie in the first place so I could figure it out on my own. It's exactly what you're saying here, and I absolutely endorse that opinion.
This is a pretty film, but it's also pretty opaque.