Yahoo Movies Studio Ghibli's new movie, The Boy and The Heron, is his latest masterpiece
Watching Studio Ghibli's The Boy and The Heron feels like taking a peek into Hayao Miyazaki's soul.
A luscious, absorbing animated masterpiece, the movie taps into Spirited Away's wild imagination, Princess Mononoke's epic scale and My Neighbour Totoro's profound emotion while assembling a unique coming-of-age about the loss of innocence.
It also deals with one of the Japanese director's most pressing concerns: Who will be the heroes fighting for our wrecked world when he's no longer here to see it?
Miyazaki's personal life, obsessions and fears are present in this new movie — but as retirement escapes him over and over, stories are getting more ferocious, expansive and difficult to pin down.
Miyazaki's hand-drawn craft is once again a force of nature in one of the most monumental visual experiences of the year.
The Boys and The Heron follows Mahito, a 10-year-old who moves from Tokyo to the countryside after his sick mother died in a hospital fire, a consequence of the ongoing World War Two.
Mahito and his father are moving in with Mahito's aunt, who happens to be his father's new wife, to a big old house full of mysteries and secrets.
For a while, it was believed the movie was an adaptation of the 1937 novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, where a kid learns of the complexities of human life through his uncle's teachings. Instead, this was just a starting point.
The actual book is featured briefly in the movie, as Mahito, too, is trying to comprehend the world while in a deep state of grief.
Fantasy quickly finds a way into his life, as a talking grey heron lures Mahito into a mysterious tower hidden in the house's vast garden, and he finds himself drawn into a surreal and magical adventure.
If The Wind Rises was a tribute to Miyazaki’s love for aviation and his conflicted feelings around technology becoming weapons, The Boy and The Heron is, in a way, a love letter to fantasy and children's literature.
The film's premise quickly connects to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland — one character even replies to someone offering a smoke by saying, "I'm not a caterpillar!" — and L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where fantasy and reality blur after suffering a blow to the head.
There are also nods to Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Antoine de Saint-Exupér's The Little Prince and Ursula K LeGuin's work.
Miyazaki's movies have always been influenced by these stories filled with grand adventures, a sense of wonder and transformative life lessons. However, the director's phenomenal imagination allowed him to create a distinctive universe that this new movie lives in.
It's not only his past pouring once again into the story. (Mahito's father, like Miyazaki's, runs a factory that builds plane pieces. And Miyazaki, like Mahito, also left Tokyo as a child because of WWII, and his mother endured a long-term illness.) It's also his present and future as Miyazaki faces his lack of a successor at Studio Ghibli.
It's not a sad realisation, though. Although he is deeply concerned about our crumbling, decayed world, his rock-solid trust in children's courage to be the future the world needs has never faltered.
That's the ultimate conflict in Miyazaki’s oeuvre, including The Boy and The Heron: a deep pessimism being kept at bay with a firm hope for the new generations.
Despite the self-reflective nature of his new movie, Miyazaki still has some tricks up his sleeve when it comes to storytelling.
This is probably his trippiest work, a torrent of imagination and creativity unleashed into the story, strikingly different to his more restrained films. The story is twisty and surprising, though narrative tricks never overshadow the richly layered topics.
As with every one of his movies, The Boy and The Heron is blessed with a longer-than-most lifespan, growing and expanding with time like an untamed, living creature.
The Boy and The Heron is out in UK cinemas now.
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