Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Boy and the Heron’ on HBO Max, Hayao Miyazaki’s New Masterpiece of Heart and Vision

For my buck-and-a-half, the parakeets make The Boy and the Heron (now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), more so than the nutty-ass heron himself. Such are the delightful and strange surprises Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki packs into his films, and this one, reportedly but possibly not his last (I think the same was said of his last one, 2013’s The Wind Rises). Par for the course, the film is meticulously hand-drawn, and is a return to absolute fantastical form for Miyazaki, albeit with enough fresh surreal touches and deep poignancy to make it both a nod to his greatest past works and very much its own venture. The master director/animator, now 83, was rewarded with an Oscar, a BAFTA, nearly $300 million in worldwide box office grosses and, as this review further affirms, significant critical acclaim.

THE BOY AND THE HERON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Air raid sirens. The bombs killed his mother, burning her alive in a hospital, and forced him from his home. Mahito (Luca Padovan) is 11 and he shouldn’t be going through this. Nothing justifies his suffering. “Three years into the war, my mother died,” he narrates. “A year later, my father and I left Tokyo.” They end up in the countryside at a grand old house, and Natsuko (Gemma Chan) looks just like his mother, and there’s a reason for that – she’s his mother’s sister. She introduces herself to Mahito as his “new mother.” And she’s pregnant. It’s a lot all at once for an 11-year-old.

At least Natsuko is kind and willing. Mahito’s new life offers him all the material things he’ll ever need – and his father Shoichi (Christian Bale) too, whose factory is so close you can see it from the front steps. (Shoichi owns it, building airplanes for the war effort. Yes, they can afford many things thanks to this enterprise.) Mahito has his own room, a sprawling estate to explore inside and out, a servant staff at beck and call. This is where it gets, well, odd. Seven grannies scurry about fussing over him and they’re small and eccentric like Snow White’s dwarf compadres. An unusually aggressive heron seems to be stalking him, staring from the pond, peering in his window, landing on the sill and shitting and squawking. And a tower-silo stands on the grounds, its entrance blocked by debris. He follows the heron’s molted feathers into the tower, collecting them, but Mahito can’t fit through a narrow crevice. Natsuko shares the story of the tower: Her granduncle built it, filled it with books, went mad and disappeared, never to be seen again. It sounds like a myth.

Mahito regularly dreams about trying and failing to save his mother from grasping flames. He attends school and is the rich kid, an object of scowls and fists; on his way home, Mahito hits himself on the side of the head with a rock and walks home, blood pouring from the wound. He spots the heron in the pond and approaches. “I will guide you to your mother,” it says as a chorus of fish tails up out of the water and echoes it and a legion of frogs climbs all over Mahito, smothering him. He faints. When he awakens, he fashions a bow and arrow to ward off the heron threat. The arrow doesn’t fly straight, so he affixes the heron’s feathers as the fletching. Soon thereafter, Natsuko wanders into the forest. She had been ailing due to the pregnancy, and now she’s missing. Mahito tracks her path and follows dream-logic transitions into a world that makes no logical sense, and giant, goose-stepping, people-eating parakeets aren’t even the half of it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bizarre dreams, quasi-doppelgangers, a narrative playing out in nonsense-time – Miyazaki’s work has always been wildly creative, but it’s never been so, you know, David Lynch before. Think Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive if the edge was more whimsical than horrifying. And animated, of course.

Performance Worth Watching: It took Miyazaki and his animators years – years – to hand-draw every cel in this film. Watch that.

Memorable Dialogue: “Your presence is requested!” – the heron’s mantra

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The story of a child escaping real-life hardship by indulging their imagination and undergoing a spiritual journey isn’t a new one for Miyazaki, Ghibli or anyone, it seems. But The Boy and the Heron feels special, almost monumental, for being an explosion of creativity stemming from the filmmaker’s own life – residual feelings from his family being chased from urban to rural environs by World War II, from their affluence due to their father’s (essentially war-profiteering) industry, from his connection with his mother (who lived to be 72, a point of departure for the film). He takes his specific experiences and broadens them to a universal idea: How do children deal with loss, tragedy, the grotesqueries of war, all things so much bigger than themselves? It’s a shock to young minds still learning the core tenets of altruism. 

As the best stories inevitably do, the film feels emotionally accessible at the same time it’s deeply personal to its creator – who, you’re likely aware, channeled the broad patina of his emotional life into myriad films that touched many so profoundly. For me, it’s My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and Ponyo, and I feel, through simple interpretation of images, I willed references to them into existence in The Boy and the Heron: The mysterious trail into the woods Mahito follows feels like an explicit rendering of the path to the slumbering forest spirit Totoro; the spirits Mahito sees rowing through the waters are black, almost cosmos-beings like the bathhouse beings in Spirited Away; at one point, Mahito navigates and angry sea like the one Ponyo merges with. 

Perhaps these are specific callbacks Miyazaki inserted on purpose, the act of a man looking retrospectively over his early life, and, within the logic-deprived out-of-time-and-space unreality Mahito visits, envisioning his creations from past films as the product of fruitful dreams. (The director makes a point to occasionally show Mahito’s feet in close-up, on solid ground, as if to toy with us before rendering the character’s reality indelibly liquid. As ever, Miyazaki’s eye for such detail is keen; there are no throwaway shots here.) You also could write a master’s thesis on Miyazaki’s many grannies throughout his filmography – they’re always in some way nurturing, authoritative and in touch with the ethereal, and always rendered with strange faces dotted with warts and moles, their eyes large, buggy, often pointed in opposite directions, the distortions of a child’s point-of-view. 

In these old women, and many other elements of The Boy and the Heron – god, the pelicans and frogs and that heron, who seems to have a strange, strange man living inside his belly, they’re all wonders – there is weirdness and seriousness and comedy and danger and magnificent pathos, emotions and impressions that never stand out starkly, but blend together as the fabric of life. I was especially moved by scenes in which Mahito summoned bravery from somewhere deep inside him, not for his emerging courage, but because I couldn’t help but wonder if Miyazaki is doing the same with this lovely, sad, bizarre and, above all that, life-affirming film.

Our Call: Is The Boy and the Heron another Miyazaki masterwork? I think so. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.