THE BOY AND THE HERON - Mark Reviews Movies

The Boy and the Heron, GKIDS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

After a ten-year retirement that turns out to have been just a hiatus, writer/director Hayao Miyazaki has made another feature-length animated movie. The return of a true visionary—one of the most creative and accomplished filmmakers in the medium of animation—is worth celebrating, but The Boy and the Heron, his latest, doesn't reach the heights of Miyazaki's best works. Indeed, the filmmaker's usually cohesive storytelling prowess seems hindered here, although Miyazaki's obvious imagination and the skill of his team of artists at Studio Ghibli almost make up for that rather notable shortcoming.

The movie is a marvel of design, to be sure, with the animators lovingly re-creating the countryside of a World War II-era Japan and giving us various fantastical locales that somehow seem both of this world and otherworldly. As the title suggests, a good amount of this fantasy realm has to do with birds—although a lot less than one might anticipate (but more droppings from the flying animals than one might expect).

There's the eponymous bird, which is hiding someone—or something—in its fragile body. There's also an entire kingdom consisting of human-sized parakeets, although that world arrives so late and with little to no fanfare that, like a lot of the fantasy elements of the story, it almost feels as if Miyazaki came up with the notion and felt obliged to fit it into the tale.

A central problem, perhaps, is that this movie doesn't contain a narrative or emotional through line to carry it through to the end of it visions. That's particularly strange, considering how loaded with obvious distress, terror, and grief the opening section of the story is.

It follows Mahito (voice of Soma Santoki), a pre-teen boy growing up during the war. In the opening scene, the kid is awakened by sirens and the clambering of masses of people outside his Tokyo home. The local hospital, as well as other buildings, has caught fire, and as Mahito rushes toward the blaze where his mother is working, the intense heat makes everyone and everything in the flame-filled shots appear warped and distorted.

How much do we lose with modern animation, so often accomplished by way of computers, and its insistence that things look as realistic as possible? The effect of this scene might be based on a real visual phenomenon, but in the filmmakers' literal hands, it becomes an almost abstract representation of one boy's fear amidst a terrifying event with an unthinkable outcome.

About a year later, Mahito and his father Shoichi (voice of Takuya Kimura), who owns and operates an airplane factory, move from the city to the country, where the two will now live with the father's new wife, the late mother's sister, Natsuko (voice of Yoshino Kimura). Mahito, of course, has a lot with which to deal: a new home in an unfamiliar place, a father who's always at work, a stepmother who's pregnant, seven tiny old maids who bicker and gossip, and, obviously, the lingering grief of losing his mother, who comes to him in dreams in which she's engulfed in flames and pleading for his help.

Most of this story, though, revolves around Mahito wandering about the area, discovering the odd gray heron and its home in a mysterious tower built by a great-granduncle, and finding himself in an alternate dimension, where life and death mean little, apparently, because it's a place that exists outside of but with access to all of time. The rules of this place are vague and shaky, mainly because it's primarily about Miyazaki giving us gorgeous landscapes and pieces of architecture, showing off assorted creatures, and hinting at some emotional core that remains frustratingly out of reach.

It's right there, too, strangely, as Mahito learns about his ancestor and the potential importance of his family line, as a woman named Lady Himi (voice of Aimyon), who has the power to conjure fire and looks a lot like the aunt/stepmother who looks a lot like the boy's mother when she was younger, guides him in his quest. That involves Natsuko disappearing into the woods and the odd, little man, with an untrusting manner and a bulbous nose, who lives inside the gray heron (voice of Masaki Suda) promising that he can bring the boy to his mother.

There's a lot, in other words, going on in this plot, although too much of it feels pieced together from the basic idea of Mahito's torn loyalties—to memory of his mother and the new family he's going to have—and distressed mind. Mostly, it comes across as an excuse to give us some wondrous sight and quirky characters.

They are wonderful, at least, such as a coastal sanctuary looking out upon a vast sea, where a constant convoy of ships sails with crews of phantoms, and the apparent center of this timeless dimension, where a row of archways leads to an expanse of stars and the space rock that seems to make it all possible. Watching The Boy and the Heron is to be overwhelmed by the degree of detail in these imaginative images, but what else has one come to expect from a master like Miyazaki? For one thing, it's a story that matches those artistic wonders, and in this case, the filmmaker has come up decidedly and disappointingly short on that front.

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