This last week, North American audiences got their long-awaited first glimpse at beloved animator Hayao Miyazaki’s (maybe, maybe not) swansong,The Boy and the Heron.Already, the teaser promises the signature brand of painstakingly crafted, visually dazzling imagination that fans of Studio Ghibli have come to expect.
While the teaser thankfully doesn’t give much of the plot away, what’s already evident is that the film sees Miyazaki returning to one of his most iconic thematic obsessions. Throughout his career, he has always been fascinated by coming-of-age stories, in particular ones that contrast the naivety and innocence of childhood with the more bittersweet truths of adult life, andThe Boy and the Heronlooks to be another worthy exploration into that concept.
A Career Built on Childhood
From the start of his legendary career, Hayao Miyazaki has used his films to explore the nature of childhood and the idealism of youth and how it can be an escape from harder realities. In particular, his early works likeMy Neighbor TotoroandKiki’s Delivery Servicetackled this idea in a way explicitly targeted at children, with a greatly laid-back and relaxed atmosphere.
My Neighbor Totoro, arguably the most kid-friendly and accessible film of Miyazaki’s career, focuses on two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei, whose lives are in upheaval as their mother is recovering in the hospital from a mysterious illness. The girls meet the titular Totoro, a cuddly forest spirit who offers them an escape from their uncertain reality as he encourages them to express their emotions in a healthy manner and to have patience in the natural order of life.
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Meanwhile,Kiki’s Delivery Serviceused a slightly different allegorical lens to explore the coming-of-age genre. Specifically, with the character of Kiki, a young witch spending a year away from home to hone her powers, Miyazaki used his story to mirror a familiar journey for every young adult, namely moving to a new city and rediscovering a sense of self after stability is upended. Indeed, throughout the movie, Kiki deals with homesickness and isolation, but by the end, she seems to have reached a somewhat stable acceptance of her newfound maturity.
As Miyazaki’s career in more recent years got darker and more experimental, so too did his explorations of childhood.Spirited Away, widely considered his magnum opus, took the form of are-imaging ofAlice in Wonderland, with protagonist Chihiro’s passage from childhood into adolescence symbolically marked by her passage through a bizarre, frightening spirit world.
While Miyazaki reached many of the same thematic conclusions as his early works, namely that reaching adulthood means realizing that the world isn’t defined by absolutes, he reached them in a much more symbolic, allegorical manner than he had in the past, not unlike David Lynch’s transition into more abstract affair halfway through his career.
A True Successor to Spirited Away?
The scant plot details and images released thus far forThe Boy and the Heronseem to signify another deeply felt coming-of-age story from Miyazaki. The official logline details, “A young boy named Mahito longing for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning. A semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death and creation, in tribute to friendship, from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.”
Like the main character,Mahito, Miyazaki was born in 1941 and raised in the Japanese countryside to escape the Tokyo air raids while his father helped build fighter planes, and Mahito’s attachment to his mother mirrors the director’s close relationship with his own. Already, it’s clear that this story will be Miyazaki’s most personally rooted to date.
And the journey into the aforementioned fantastical world has already given feelings incredibly reminiscent ofSpirited Away. Bizarre imagerydominated the trailer, with glimpses of scenes involving forest spirits, a demon rising forth from flames, the frightening-looking titular heron, and a mysterious woman’s face dissolving into liquid. It seems safe to conclude that Miyazaki will be operating in his later-period, more symbolic mode of storytelling.
The apparent similarities to Miyazaki’s masterpiece don’t stop there. As previously mentioned,Spirited Awayused its journey into a spiritual realm as a gateway for Chihiro’s transition from a spoiled little girl into a young woman more spiritually attuned to nature, with a more nuanced understanding of the world around her.
SinceThe Boy and the Heronpromises a journey into a world between the living and the dead, it could function as the same kind of allegorical awakening of Mahito. Since he’s dealing with the loss of his mother, it seems a natural conclusion that Miyazaki would use his journey to help the still-adolescent Mahito face the more bittersweet realities of adulthood, namely the inevitability of loss and grief.
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Another Miyazaki Masterwork
Already, reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival have ravedThe Boy and the Heronas another work of genius from arguably the greatest animation director who ever lived. Specifically,they’ve noted it asone of Miyazaki’s most thematically dense and abstract films to date and a heartwrenching portrait of a boy struggling to find meaning in the passing of a loved one.
Arguably, nothing defines a Hayao Miyazaki work more than a vivid depiction of childhood and all its nuances and complexities in coming to a deeper understanding of the larger world. And all signs point toThe Boy and the Heronproudly carrying this tradition on.
