The Boy and the Heron — Miyazaki's Late Grace

The Boy and the Heron — Miyazaki's first film in a decade, possibly his last — is a portal fantasy that keeps circling back to grief. Its protagonist, Mahito, loses his mother in a hospital fire at the start of the war. He moves to the countryside with his father and pregnant stepmother. He is lonely, angry, and dreaming. A heron with a human face begins to follow him.

What follows is a Miyazaki film of extraordinary strangeness. The rules of the tower-world are not quite the rules of Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle; the imagery is more allusive, more personal, sometimes unclear. The film is not as coherent as Miyazaki's most beloved work. It might be his most personal.

Late Style

There is a kind of late-career film, by a great filmmaker, where coherence loosens in favour of intuition. Kurosawa's Dreams. Fellini's Orchestra Rehearsal. Scorsese's Silence, though Scorsese is not quite done yet. The Boy and the Heron is that kind of film. It contains images that may not "make sense" in a tidy narrative structure but land with uncanny emotional precision. A room full of tiny white beings called Warawara rising into the sky. A grandfather cradling a universe made of blocks, trying to find a good successor to hold it together.

These images are not ornament. They are the point.

Watch in Japanese, If You Can

The English dub is serviceable — Christian Bale, Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe give it their all — but the Japanese original has a precision of tone that no dub can quite reproduce. Many Canadian cinemas run at least one Japanese-subtitled showing per day. It is worth seeking out. Check listings at your Cineplex, Imagine Carlton, or the Bloor Hot Docs.

It is the kind of film that you do not fully understand the first time. You stand up afterward, you're not sure what you just saw, and two weeks later you find yourself thinking about the heron.