The Boy and the Heron | How to reconstruct the world through fantasy

The Boy and the Heron | How to reconstruct the world through fantasy – After The Wind Rises, Miyazaki vowed to retire. After the death of his teacher, Isao Takahata, reflection on his legacy invited the director to return with a film assault that restores hope in creation.

By Megan Sauer

The Boy and the Heron marks the return to cinema of Hayao Miyazaki. This installment has cinematography that rests on passion for fantasy, the mythological development of a complete and poetic universe.

But with the contained craft of someone who masters the art of narrative and never wastes a single minute on anything that does not directly provide emotion. linked to its purpose: to move the viewer and make them fall in love with its intimate cosmos, while affecting its characters to the point of spiritual transformation.

We know well the threat of this film announced by Studio Ghibli: the last of an international animation legend. But it’s also not the first time he’s supposedly retired.

We are before one of the most frequently retired directors of cinema in a tribute to his mentor: Isao Takahata , who died in 2018 at the age of 82.

That is to say, there is a lot of that magician-apprentice relationship, which although it implies a beautiful possibility, also represents a destiny that implies never returning to everyday life without the X-ray vision that art—or magic—provides.

What is ‘The Boy and the Heron’ about?

In fact, in The Boy and the Heron he includes a substitute for Takahata, in this case an absent great-uncle, a great sorcerer obsessed with the next generation—and, above all, with the construction of a “perfect” world (or whatever). he understands this) on the part of this new generation.

This contrast, which shows his reunion in old age with creative freedom, disagrees, for example, with his previous final film, The Wind Rises, where the metaphor of the aeronautical engineer who creates something profoundly beautiful that ends up serving destruction, seemed an artistic lament to the possibilities of dreams having an extension of their beauty on the physical plane.

The entire film, in some way, functions as a testament.

This film challenges the traditional perception of Miyazaki, with a pessimistic and monolithic bias in his vision of the creator (almost all possibilities of a world of his own die with the demiurges in question), by daring to imagine a better world beyond his own legacy.

Although often labeled a traditionalist by certain critics who only conceive of the European-American worldview, Miyazaki injects optimism into the possibility of establishing “a kingdom free of malice” even in the midst of death and cruelty. Utopia that he receives the last criticism from him in the final act of King Parakeet.

Critic rating of ‘The Boy and the Heron’ (Credit: Tomatazos)

As a testament, it starts from a known place: the journey through a child’s fantasy to discover something important about himself (the transition to puberty in Spirited Away for example).

In this way, he takes visual, mythical and traditional elements of the Japanese imagination and puts them in suspense and perspective by refining (even more) the freedom he learned, as is already evident to his fans (among whom I am a member), from Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl .

It is, in more ways than one, a palimpsest to denote its stylistic roots with the intelligence and power that Miyazaki’s animation allows.

For example, we see that The Boy and the Heron is inspired by Takahata’s work, Grave of the Fireflies, representing the bombing of Tokyo in 1943, capturing anguish and blurring the shapes of people, fusing the personal, cultural and historical as a setting in which a fantastic world, characteristic of Studio Ghibli, takes place.

A little in tune with milestones by Guillermo del Toro , The Shape of Water, Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro, or his masterful work Pan’s Labyrinth.

That is to say: only in the horror of a reality devastated by hatred, can the encounter with a new world flourish.

The monstrous and the beautiful in ‘The Boy and the Heron’?

Miyazaki is not ignorant of these antecedents, neither of his contemporaries nor of his colleagues.

On the contrary, he seems to quote them in this installment, as if he enrolled in that lineage of cinema in search of a world beyond ours. For him, the monstrous and the beautiful sometimes have a place in the same face or even share a patina.

To do this, he uses a story that allows him to explore a tragic event (the loss of his mother during a lavish fire), the encounter with a new life (the acceptance of his stepmother as his new mother, as well as the upcoming arrival of his brother. to the family).

We meet Mahito (masterfully voiced in Spanish by Emilio Treviño ), our infant protagonist, running through the city, trying to reach his mother, trapped in a burning hospital.

People move like shadows, their shapes blurred by the heat and chaos, an impression of misery that is encouraged by a plastic that turns people into possible flames.

The young man, resentful but vulnerable, is taken years later to the countryside after the death of his mother, only to be tempted to follow a gravelly-voiced and disgusting heron-goblin (voiced in Spanish by Alfonso Herrera ) into a world of endless corridors, dictatorial cockatoos and bulbous creatures called warawara.

But his trip has a purpose: to rescue his aunt, his mother’s sister, who has married his father and is expecting a baby. And this is where the entire construction of the film finds its collapse: the emotions of a child faced with a world that has surpassed his mother.

The cross-country and open sea adventure, through intricate palaces and confrontations between forces of nature transformed by a magical meteorite, aims to reconcile Mahito with his aunt, that is, his new mother.

The moments of greatest sacrifice come from that meeting between accepting loss and, more importantly, opening up to happiness in a new life.

Yes, it’s horrible and it’s beautiful at the same time. Everything in El Niño y La Garza has that: the forms of love that come from clinging to bonds that go beyond blood, that transcend dimensions, prejudices and pain.

Hence, from the title, Miyazaki tells us what is happening: an infant will find himself on an adventure through the meanders of splendor and monstrosity.

Even in the flames: whatever was destruction at the beginning, is the beautiful ability of Mihi, the child spirit of his mother in his great-uncle’s universe.

The heron is the epitome of the beauty-ugliness dichotomy that Miyazaki’s fantastic art entails.

It is both ally and monster, spreading its beak and feathers to reveal the senile features of a human-like elf. A being that, in crucial moments, is part of Mahito’s ruin and salvation. As usually happens, for example, with parents.